‘Succession’ Fans Are Dunking On Shiv Roy Following Massive Ep. 8 Screw-Up

shiv roy america decides succession

HBO


Warning: This article will contain spoilers for the final season of HBO’s Succession
, including the most recent episode, Season 4, Episode 8, “America Decides”

The third-to-last episode of Succession was one of the most consequential in the history of the show as the actions of the bumbling Roy kids not only had an impact on their lives, but of the course of American history.

To summarize, the episode centers around the Roy trio, Tom, and various ATN executives making calls for the Presidential election, i.e., Democratic candidate Daniel Jimenez has won Pennsylvania or Republican candidate Jeryd Mencken has won Arizona.

In Wisconsin, however, a fire at a polling site (likely caused by domestic terrorism) in Milwaukee has thrust the results — which show Mencken leading by a slim margin — into a gray area that Roman decides to capitalize on by simply calling the state for Mencken by virtue of the already-counted votes.

Shiv, however — both protecting her personal aspirations and what she believes to be a morally-correct defense of the democratic process — attempts to stop Roman by wooing Kendall onto her side.

Unfortunately for Shiv, Jimenez, and democracy in the world of Succession, her JV-level ability to plot and scheme blew up in her face, resulting in Kendall realizing she was trying to play him and siding with Roman instead, thus swinging the election in Mencken’s favor.

While Shiv obviously isn’t the worst of the Roy kids, what makes her failures all the more frustrating is that both she and the audience expect more from her.

We know Kendall is erratic and we know Roman is maniacal — Shiv is supposed to be the reasonable one. And yet, even still, that moral compass isn’t enough to deter from the fact that she, like her brothers, is an idiot, which was ultimately her undoing in “America Decides.”

The penultimate episode of HBO’s Emmy-winning series Succession, titled “Church and State”, will premiere on Sunday, May 21. That will then be followed by the series finale, which is titled “With Open Eyes” and has a reported runtime of 90 minutes, on Sunday, May 28 at 9 p.m. EST.

Eric Italiano BroBIble avatar
Eric Italiano is a NYC-based writer who spearheads BroBible's Pop Culture and Entertainment content. He covers topics such as Movies, TV, and Video Games, while interviewing actors, directors, and writers.