Succession and the Neuroscience of Memory

HBO's acclaimed series Succession raises broader questions about how memory and narrative work, both personally and culturally

In the fourth and final season of Jesse Armstrong’s acclaimed HBO series Succession, media mogul Logan Roy, founder and CEO of the multi-billion-dollar entertainment conglomerate Waystar Royco, collapses and dies aboard his private jet while en route to Sweden. For those who haven’t watched Succession, that’s not a spoiler; it’s an inevitability hardwired into the show’s premise, which follows Logan’s jockeying, scheming, and backstabbing children—Connor, Kendall, Roman, and Siobhan—as they vie to replace their father as head of the company. It’s a corporate Game of Thrones, with battles fought no less viciously through boardrooms, lawsuits, and back-room deals.

Logan’s demise has always been inevitable—nothing short of death will remove him from the C-suite and let the series advance to its conclusion—but how we experience that death comes as a surprise. Shakespearean actor Brian Cox portrays Logan as a Lear-like figure, aging and ailing but also charismatic, volatile, and cunning. His on-screen presence is immense—everything and everyone revolves around him—but in the episode where Logan dies, we don’t see him at all. Instead, we experience his death by way of flurried phone calls between the Waystar executives aboard the plane and Logan’s children, who are attending Connor’s Ellis Island wedding to a former sex worker turned dilettante playwright turned socialite fiancée. The Roys must negotiate this monumental turning point in their personal and professional lives through a wonky cell phone connection, each taking turns saying their last words to a father who is, in all likelihood, already dead. 

When action itself is unseen, our focus shifts to characters’ reactions and fears; we experience their anxiety as if we were in their shoes. Famously, while Spielberg was shooting Jaws in 1974, his mechanical sharks broke down so frequently that he had to abandon many of his planned shark-attack sequences. Instead, he crafted a masterpiece in psychological horror, aided by John Williams’s famously minimalist theme, in which the fear of what can’t be seen reigns supreme. By portraying Logan’s death off-screen, Succession highlights his children’s radically different memories and experiences of their father, raising broader questions about how memory and narrative work, both personally and culturally.

The Roy family also has horrors lurking beneath its glossy, wealthy surface; its members are tied together by an intricate web of secrets and betrayals, at the heart of which lies faulty memory. Characters repeatedly generate different accounts of events, conversations, and decisions to fit their narratives or protect their interests. In one episode, Roman polls his brothers to ask them why, when they were small, they used to lock him up in a cage and feed him dog food. Connor recalls it differently, telling Roman he liked being in the cage, and that they fed him cake. Later, when Logan hits Roman so hard he knocks out a tooth, Roman refuses to remember it. He gets emergency dental work for something that never happened.

As these examples suggest, selective remembering often results in devastating consequences as long-buried truths, half-truths, and lies resurface. Conflict intensifies as stakeholders battle for the supremacy of their version of reality. Internal struggles with guilt, shame, and regret are exacerbated by the characters’ inability to confront past actions honestly or even recall them accurately, with some haunted by memories that may or may not be accurate. On a wider cultural level, Logan—through his fictional news arm ATN—spins selective ideological narratives that make him beloved to some and despised by others. His tendency towards continually redefining the truth goes beyond creating conflict in his family; it becomes instrumental in polarizing the country.

Watching the Roys’ faulty memories become both a source of their power struggles and their downfall, we are reminded that memory is fragile and malleable, susceptible to distortion and manipulation. Neuroscience has greatly enhanced our understanding of how memory works. We know now that it is not a single, unified process, but rather a series of interconnected processes involving different regions of the brain. When we experience something, sensory information is processed in various brain regions, and relevant details are consolidated in the hippocampus to form short-term memories. However, the brain continuously processes and filters information, selecting certain details for long-term storage while discarding others. The process of converting short-term to long-term memories is known as consolidation, during which memories are stored in various brain regions, including the neocortex. In turn, our memories define the stories we tell about ourselves, which are instrumental in our sense of self.

Scientists hypothesize that selective memory likely evolved as an adaptive mechanism to optimize cognitive resources in ancestral environments where recalling pertinent information—such as potential threats or food sources—was crucial for survival. Selective memory allows us to filter out inessential details and prioritize memories that optimize our chances of survival. However, selective memory is also intimately connected to cognitive biases. Confirmation bias, for example, is our tendency to remember information that confirms preexisting beliefs while filtering out evidence that conflicts with them. In a polarized country, media narratives create both comfort and polarization—regardless of which side you are on. In the aftermath of Logan’s death, his children must oversee coverage of a contentious presidential election and make momentous decisions that may define the country’s future, at the same time as they are embroiled in complex machinations over their family dynamic, their father’s legacy, and the future of his company. In short, Succession shows how our cultural narratives arise directly from the very messy, very personal emotional process of laying down our own life narratives. 

If even the four Roy children cannot agree about their own experiences, what chance do 330 million people have in reaching consensus about their nation’s history or culture? We’ve seen recent enormous growth in fact checking—from 11 active fact-checking outlets in 2008 to 424 in 2022, per the Duke Reporters’ Lab—driven by the assumption that facts can be verified as objectively true or dismissed as objectively false, and that people will adjust their beliefs accordingly. However, this ignores that lived experience of the world is always refracted through a subjective lens. Each of us has a set of unique narratives, stemming from the stories we tell and are told about our past, our lived experiences, our beliefs, and our characters. Even if these narratives are based on flawed recollections or imagined experience—as with the Roys in Succession—our brains still perceive them to be true, because we need them to be true in order to survive. 

What hope do we have, then, for changing minds and changing culture? Neuroscience gives reason for optimism here, with discoveries that memories are not fixed. Instead, through a process called reconsolidation, we can alter memories to reflect new information or contexts. As such, our personal stories and memories can be rewritten in our brains, which suggests that we can intentionally redefine our reality by revising our narratives. Changing these narratives is why therapy works on a personal level, and why story works on a cultural level. It makes it possible to understand Succession as a powerful representation of conflicted familial memories projected onto the societal and cultural stage that we all share.