Succession: Roy family members ranked from least loathsome to most

Succession is running its final season on HBO, and it’s been pretty spectacular. Who will take Logan Roy’s throne at the head of mega-corporation Waystar Royco? Will anybody make it out of this without severe emotional scarring? Will anyone else die?

And why do we care? One of the fascinating things about Succession is that its characters are, pretty much to a man, selfish wealth monsters who think nothing of hurting others so long as it advances their own agenda. And yet we still have sympathy for them as they hit their low points. They’re written with such specificity by Jesse Armstrong and his team, and played with such humanity by the excellent cast, that we can’t help it.

But make no mistake: these people are awful, particularly the members of the mega-rich Roy family. But how awful are we talking? As the show heads into its home stretch, let’s go down the list and rank the Roys from least to most loathsome. (FYI: We’re not including minor Roy family members who haven’t played much of a role in the story or those who married into the family like Tom or Willa.)

Least loathsome Roy: Ewan Roy

The older brother of Logan Roy and grandfather to Greg, Ewan gets cut a little slack by virtue of the fact that we don’t know a ton about him. He seems brash and curt and rude, but those are minor sins compared to what some of his blood relatives have gotten up to. Of the Roy family members, he’s the only one who’s consistently looked at the empire of lies Logan has built and decries it as the cancer at the heart of American society that it is. He’s mindful of the excesses of capitalism and cares about the environment, even giving $250 million to Greenpeace in season 3, so at least he appears to be trying to do right by the planet. (That $250 million was originally going to go to Greg, but do we think he would have made good use of it?)

True, Ewan did vote against tossing Logan out of the top spot at Waystar Royco in the first season, but we won’t begrudge him over a little bit of family loyalty, particularly when the person replacing Logan probably would have been just as bad or worse. We’ll get to the lot of them.