The Box Set: "Succession."

The season and series finale, "With Open Eyes."

There may not be a more perfect line, written and spoken, that encapsulated a series and character and the situation a whole family found themselves in than when Kendall Roy, literally begging his siblings to vote for him to succeed his father, realizes it’s all crumbling tragically around him and welps out, “I’m the eldest boy!”

Again, perfection. It’s funny. It’s tragic. It’s pathetic. And, as is said, it tracks. Kendall is a grown man who wants something so painfully, whiny, spoiled-baby-saturated, that he would call himself “the eldest boy.”

It doesn’t work like that, of course, and it didn’t work out like any of the Roy siblings expected. They plotted against each other and with each other but they could never overcome their own self-interest, which was used by others to usurp them in the end. They were not serious people, as their father told them. They were merely, as their father also told them, pedestrians.

The series finale was very long — some of the bloat was well earned, though, given the series produced for seasons of witheringly funny, pathetically sad comedy and drama and entertained loyal fans to the end.

It was an episode replete with trademark caustic, intelligently-funny one-liners. And for those who keep track of such things — and critics often do — I would argue that “Succession” did indeed stick the landing and delivered to loyal viewers a believable, satisfying end that took the Shakespearean “King Lear” of it all to the finish line, in a way that was both a popular guess among fans about who would “win” and also a convincing end to often brutal, unlikable machinations between siblings, couples, friends, lovers, enemies and hangers on, all.