*Warning: This article contains Succession season four spoilers*
As a university student home for the holidays, one of my happiest memories is of opening my mother’s fridge and being confronted with a glut of food. All my favourites would be there, thoughtfully installed by a parent who, like many of her generation, found it easiest to express her love via the medium of a meal. She loved me with spaghetti bolognese, salmon bagels, chocolate brownies, Worcester Sauce crisps and cheese - especially cheese, my favourite.
Maybe you had to be a cheese lover to find the kitchen scene in Succession’s final episode one of the most poignant and enlightening of the whole season. Or maybe you had to have experienced a childhood blighted by an empty fridge. Either way, for many viewers, Peter’s Special Cheese has left a lasting impression. 'Don’t touch that! That’s Peter’s cheese!' shrieks the Roy children's English mother, Caroline [Dame Harriet Walter], as Shiv and Roman hunt in her fridge for food. 'God's sake!' she continues. 'I made that mistake myself. His special cheese - he gets really boring about it.'
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It’s sad enough that, having invited her offspring for dinner - in Barbados - Caroline proceeds to serve them a meagre salad, its size dwarfed further by the long table on which it’s placed. But it’s a different level of sad entirely that, foraging hungrily in the fridge for further sustenance (Shiv and Roman both profess to be 'starving'), they’re forbidden from eating the one item therein that looks edible. Peter’s special cheese must be eaten only by Peter, Caroline’s selfish partner who shares all of Logan’s worst traits, and none of his good ones.
That Caroline privileges Peter’s needs over those of her own children is one of many examples of how Kendall, Shiv and Roy grew up with a surfeit of wealth but a deficit of love. It’s this paucity of love that lies at the root of their problems. It’s why they fight like furious crows for any scrap of it, any proof of it, any manifestation. Succession is about many things - wealth, power, corruption - but one of its most devastating themes is love, and how the lack of it can lead you to spend the rest of your life looking for it from the wrong people, in the wrong places. Like the boardroom. Or the fridge.
They f*ck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. That’s a Philip Larkin quote, and a sentiment more doggedly and lengthily explored by Shakespeare, for whom the subject of parental alienation was something of a life’s work, not least in King Lear, the play on which Succession is most closely based. In Act 1 scene 4, the Fool tells Lear: 'Mum, mum / He that keeps nor crust nor crumb / Weary of all, shall want some,' a line that foreshadows the consequences of him bequeathing the kingdom to his daughters. Shakespeare fans will have found it hard not to draw parallels between this and Peter’s 'nobby bread.' When Roman remarks 'Mother, there really isn’t much food,' Caroline responds by offering Roman the heel of a loaf - the slice nobody wants, made even more unpalatable by the fact that it’s not even fresh, but as cold as Caroline’s own heart. 'I’ll tell you what,' she says with faux jollity. 'Peter doesn’t like the nobbies, so I freeze them. The nobbies. The loaf ends,' she clarifies, seeing her son’s confusion. 'Enjoy!'
Ironically, the nobbies go on to become the butt of a joke that brings the siblings together. 'Peter doesn't like the nobbies, darling,' says Roman in a falsetto voice, imitating his mother. 'You're a nobby! You're a nobby!' he says, throwing the frozen bread at his siblings. And they are nobbies, raised with diamonds, helicopters and cashmere Loro Piana throws but bereft of their parents’ love, of which they’ve only ever received the crusts.
Some viewers have criticised it for being out of character and jarring, but that kitchen scene in Barbados was one of my favourites, a rare instance of seeing the angry, thwarted Roys laughing together, bonding over a bag of frozen nobbies and a verboten slab of cheese. 'It’s really the happiest and the closest we’ve ever seen the Roy siblings,' Succession’s executive producer, Mark Mylod (who also directed the episode) told Vulture, adding that the scene represented the tragedy of hope. 'We tried to take the audience to a place where they believed these three could have a happy ending.'
I like to believe they could have had a happy ending. An unhappy childhood can break you, but as siblings, it can also bond you, albeit via the medium of trauma. But trauma can heal. In my fantasy Season Five that won’t ever happen (to the devastation of fans, the show’s creator, Jesse Armstrong, was adamant he’d end the show before it could get stale), losing Waystar Royco would go on to be the best thing that could happen to Ken, Shiv and Roman. By forfeiting the company and the crown, all three are losers. Yes, they lost to a demonic Swede who will destroy the company their father built, but for the first time in their lives, they are equal. Finally, they have nothing to compete for. Their father’s love died with him. The company they fought to helm is gone. Freed from these twin tyrannies, they can stride into the future on a level footing. And with the proceeds from the sale of Waystar Royco, I hope they buy a lot of special cheese.
