Succession: Ranking the members of the Roy Family

3. Siobhan “Shiv” Roy

Sarah Snook’s character, Shiv, may hate her family (especially Logan Roy), but the average fallen apple stays close to the tree. We do know that Shiv can become shrewd, rude, crude and nude to have her way. She’s also directly linked to the political world, as she seems hostile to her family’s media empire. Many would quickly point of her cheating on Tom Wamsgans, and that he, despite being horrible in general, seems to genuinely be faithful to her. In fact, she may be the sole thing preventing Tom from going over the edge into some unknown abyss of debauchery.

She has been active in the campaign of Gil Eavis (Eric Bogosian) for President, and almost seems genuinely interested in preventing her family business from gaining true monopoly status on media. Also, to complicate things, she has a way of sometimes uniting her broken brothers, and reminding them they are actually family. For that fact alone she wins a point or two of goodness.

4. Kendall Roy

Played by Jeremy Strong, Kendall Roy is oddly not the worst person on Succession. In fact, the worst aspects of his character involve his trying to appease his father Logan, and trying to run his family’s business, Waystar Royco, in a sound manner. However, his father just isn’t having that, and begrudges his son every step of the way! Logan resents how his family wants to wrangle power away from him, and Kendall is at the epicenter of Logan’s resulting abuse. He also uses drugs to cope with his depression.  For this, he wins sympathy points, at least.

Also on the plus side, Kendall tries to be aware of what’s going on in an industry, as opposed to merely dominating others like a pack of animals. That being said, Kendall is slightly worse than Shiv, as he doesn’t see much wrong with his family’s business in and of itself. Also, as we’ve seen, he’s capable of leaving the scene of an accident he caused, not saving his dead passenger, then going back to a party acting like nothing happened (Chappaquiddick-style). As bad as this is, at least we can say it was an accident.