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The Cousin Greg love-in from the third season of Succession feels like a long time ago, doesn’t it? The menswear shoots, the fancams, the instinctive glee you felt whenever his awkward frame dribbled into view.
He was the breakout star of Succession’s breakout season, and a lifebuoy for us normies who were amazed by the lifestyles of New York’s rich and business-famous. His vertigo at the “gamey, brainy hit” of deep-fried ortolan was ours.
But as season four rolls on, something is starting to crystallise. In fact, I’m just gonna say it: I think I hate Greg now. Now, Greg’s a Disgusting Brother. He’s the kind of guy who brings a date to his late uncle’s birthday party and talks about her as “another tick on the chart”.
Things got even worse in the fourth episode of the season. It was revealed that Greg’s name appears on Logan’s controversial will, which outline his final wishes for Waystar (if you can get past the doodles).
“In… In what capacity?” Greg stammers. “In what fashion?” Possibly he sees his chance to head Waystar-Gregco; possibly he fears being permanently ostracised from the family over the accidental sex tape.
Kendall’s name is on the bit of paper as a possible head honcho – or the exact opposite, who knows – and Greg’s is on there too. “And so perhaps,” Greg tries, “the natural conclusion might be I’d be his number two?”
The greybeards – Frank, Karl, Gerri – laugh in Greg’s face. Now, clearly, we’d all love to know what transformative plans the boy who has had absolutely no ideas apart from cravenly jumping onto whoever looks like the worst bet at any one time, has for a multi-billion dollar company, but it’s never going to happen.
Greg won’t stop pushing himself to the front of the queue though, hovering around Marcia when the genuinely distraught Kerry turns up to grab some bits she’d left in Logan’s room. It’s all very reminiscent of Greg somehow managing to put himself between Logan and Marcia in the car all the way back in the first episode.
“Oh she’s coming over. It’s so distasteful,” Greg says, audibly clutching his pearls. “Don’t look, Marcia, it’s too unpleasant.”
Kerry’s makeup bag spills all over the floor. While Roman goes to help – and get Kerry’s number, possibly to get a bit more info on his dad’s last days and work out whether Logan heard his exasperated voicemail before dropping his phone in the toilet – Greg stations himself next to Marcia and tuts: “Oh God, here come the waterworks.”
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I mean! Greg! You shit! And then, as Kendall and Roman are unveiled as two extremely glum-looking interim CEOs, it’s Greg chanting: “Long live the king! And the other king!”
Now, Greg’s been the cuckoo in the nest from the very start. When he was, as Kendall put it at the end of season one, a “little Machiavellian fuck,” he was the one transparently grasping outsider who made transparent grasping look cute.
He lived in a youth hostel. He took company pastries home in doggy bags. You rooted for him against the entitled Roys. Maybe you even nodded sagely at his opinions on California Pizza Kitchen. This, you thought, was our guy. He was always about to be crushed by the Roy machine, and yet he managed to just about stay out of danger.
But the drip-drip-drip of shitty behaviour and craven – as well as completely inept – manoeuvring from Greg this season feels totally different. He is a bad person now.
Granted, he’s been surrounded by bad people for a long time. Where the Roy kids have been soaked in Logan’s particular brand of business-by-shanking since they were born, though, Greg saw it from the outside and decided he wanted in. He threw away his grandfather’s $250 million because he saw the Roys’ wealth and decided he wanted more. He’d really quite like a decent title, plus more money than God. Nicholas Braun did point out ahead of this season that Greg was about to take a turn.
“Greg is tested and Greg puts himself forward as a different kind of guy at times this season and he’s more bold than we’ve ever seen him, and strategic,” Braun told Deadline. “I mean, he’s always been a guy who’s tried to play whatever sides are available to him and he really leans into that this season.”
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So Greg’s evil now. Why does it matter? It matters because it suddenly feels like the endgame of Succession is clicking into place, that a few narrative arcs are entering the last fall of their parabola.
Take Roman, for instance. While Greg was puking through the eyes of a dog mascot costume at a Waystar park, Roman was taunting a child with a cheque for a million dollars, which he then tore up while cackling. He looked like Gordon Gekko. He was absolutely disgusting.
This season, though, when the Roy kids have been at their most vulnerable and sympathetic – Shiv’s crushed by the weight of her collapsing marriage, Ken’s broken up, Connor’s a sadsack, they’re all grieving – Roman’s been the most vulnerable and sympathetic of them all.
It used to feel like everyone else in the show was collateral in the Roy family demolition derby; now you worry that Kendall, Roman and Shiv might be squeezed out themselves. It happened so subtly that we didn’t even really notice, but Succession has always been a tragedy wrapped up in zingers.
This latest episode made clear that Greg’s tragedy will likely be in finding a pot of gold but losing himself, while the Roy kids are on the opposite path.
I hate Greg now because Roman, Shiv and Kendall clearly have no time for him, and the fact that I have now been drawn into feeling something for the most venomous bunch of backstabbers on TV. That in itself is a marker of how intensely good Succession has been.
The show took the one character you thought you knew, and corrupted him before your eyes while making you root for him at the same time. Cousin Greg is evil now, and I think I might be too.
‘Succession’ airs weekly on Sky Atlantic and NOW TV
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