When Succession premiered in 2018, television had a real habit of patting itself on the back for its female characters. Finally, women were not just props! Finally, women could be strong! Finally, women could be messy – or funny or imperfect or unlikeable! Finally, women could exist without being defined by how they exist in relation to men!
Then we met Shiv Roy. Logan Roy’s fourth-born child, his “Pinky”, his only daughter, who is entirely defined by the men around her and who is one of the most complex characters in television history.
There’s her bullying, demigod father, her older brothers – the goon Connor, the addict heir apparent Kendall, the verbally incontinent Roman – and her husband, the venal, ungainly, devoted Tom Wambsgans whom she dominates and treats like an accessory and is possibly the only one over whom she consistently had the upper hand, until he sided with her father and betrayed her. I challenge you to tell me who she is without them. I can’t, you can’t and neither can she – and she knows it.
Who is Siobhan Roy? Underneath that severe bob, the pantsuits, the easy poise, the supercilious smirks, the hideous, vicious tongue and that practised independence, the answer is “brittle”. She is always trying to work it out.
How can she prove her strength to Daddy and win his impossible approval and also prove to the rest of the world that she is not just an heiress who needs Daddy’s approval? How can she cling onto her principles and grab onto power? Can she try to use her gender as an advantage – or should she accept it is an irreconcilable flaw and suppress every concession to it in a bid to keep up with her brothers and business contemporaries? Shiv never wins because those internal tussles leave her weak. She is desperate and imprudent and entitled and spoilt, too.
In season one, Shiv (by the way, American slang for a makeshift knife, the kind fashioned from razors by prison inmates) was working for a Democratic senator in Washington DC – loose hair, slouchy clothes, and uninvolved in the highest machinations at Waystar Royco, where she was just a shareholder.
We were encouraged to see her as an antidote to her brothers and father (in that she appeared to have a bit of a conscience) – “the acceptable face of the worst family in America” as one character put it – and I expect this was an identity she carved out for herself. She couldn’t be a man – but she could be a liberal, a voice of reason, a moral centre while her brothers embodied all that masculine corporate greed of their father and the Roy family name.
But when the line of succession suddenly didn’t seem so straight, Shiv wanted in. Five years later, she has risen into a corporate tyrant in training (do not confuse her with a “girlboss” – Shiv would snarl at any “business bitch” trying to set a feminist example) and we know there is no moral centre to this series and we long ago stopped willing Shiv or any of the rest of them to do the right thing.
We have watched her coerce a sexual assault victim into silence, watched her cheat on her husband and ask for an open marriage on her own wedding night, watched her offer him up as a blood sacrifice to be sent to prison for historic company crimes, watched her possibly snort cocaine while 20 weeks pregnant and watched her backstab her brothers about three times per episode. She double-crosses, manipulates and wields her sex appeal to get people to do what they want for her and disposes of them when she’s finished. Shiv’s need to be desired by men and by women is just about the only craving that matches the one for control.
Just like her brothers’, her life is a pursuit of trying to be more “like” her father and she never measures up. She’s just as corrupt (and duplicitous and selfish and funny and poetic and unapologetic – these are Roy traits) as they are, but her uncertain sense of self colours her decision-making, which is regularly ill-judged to the point of embarrassing.
Prematurely announcing she was set to take over without Logan’s permission, writing a character assassination of Kendall to release to the press so horrifically cruel Connor and Roman refused to sign it – a “Times New Roman firing squad” as the former put it – faking that election night phone call and revealing her side-dealings with Matsson to her brothers. One thing you can predict Shiv will do is misfire. You cannot predict how she’ll do it.
She thinks that her liberalism and femininity give her a kind of exceptionalism, a higher intelligence or clarity of thinking that the other members of her family do not possess. They don’t. She goes too far, she fumbles her convoluted scheme and she comes crawling back to the family anyway because the thing is, she does need all of those men – only among them does she know her place in the world. Or did until her marriage soured, her father died, she got pregnant, and even her family became unrecognisable to her.
And yet – and I’m sorry for this – I love her. Sarah Snook’s performance is so dazzlingly intense and brutally funny that I sometimes can’t breathe when Shiv comes on screen, so voyeuristically excited to see what move she might make next and simultaneously so devastated for her every time she gets her heart broken by one of those men she loves, every time the world’s immoveable misogyny brands her hysterical and beats her into submission, and every time the emotions she has been taught are shameful threaten to break her porcelain surface. We will never see anyone like her on TV again. Who is she? She’s Shiv Fucking Roy.
