Shiv and Let Die: Picturing a Whole Woman
Shiv Roy…how does one even begin to explain Shiv Roy?
Shiv Roy is the female lead of the hit HBO show Succession, played to perfection by Sarah Snook.
Shiv Roy is a bitch. She’s mean to her nice husband and siblings.
Shiv Roy isn’t actually a bitch; in fact, she’s the moral centre of the family and the only genuinely good character of the show.
Shiv Roy is useless. She’s incompetent at every job she’s had.
Shiv Roy is a girlboss. She’s fought for her jobs against a patriarchal world and is a queen at every job she does.
Shiv Roy is a master manipulator who can’t be trusted - more so than any other character.
Shiv Roy is an idiot who can’t tell when she’s being manipulated - more so than any other character.
Shiv Roy is all of these and more. Every single character on Succession is all of these and more, yet it’s Shiv who gets only a glimmer of the fandom’s admiration, with much more fandom vitriol. She is just the latest of a string of female characters that the audience doesn’t know how to deal with.
In 2013, when Breaking Bad was at its peak, Anna Gunn, the actress who expertly played Skylar White, was getting death threats. For those of you who haven’t seen it, please close this website and go watch Breaking Bad on Netflix.
Now that you’re back, wasn’t that the best show ever!!! Anyway, you’re now aware that Skylar White was the wife of protagonist Walter White - her biggest crimes in the show were smoking whilst pregnant, and being angry that her husband had turned into a homicidal meth kingpin. What a bitch. She was a ball and chain, a shrew, a nag.
Of course, none of this hatred was aimed at Walter White who murdered several people. The biggest crime you can commit on TV is being angry at your husband. TV discussion forums would be flooded with comments like ““Could somebody tell me where I can find Anna Gunn so I can kill her?”” (A normal commenter having a normal reaction to a TV show). Things got so toxic that show creator, Vince Gilligan gave multiple interviews defending Skylar, and Anna Gunn penned an op-ed to the New York Times basically telling everyone to cool down. A decade later, the internet still doesn’t know what to do with an interesting and complex female character.
So let us examine the two faces of Shiv Roy, as assigned by the Succession fandom:
Shiv Roy, the villain
“Shiv Roy and Skylar White battling for pettiest white woman in TV history”.
“Shiv Roy just became my most hated character in TV history. Made Skylar White look like Mother Theresa”.
There’s a sizeable portion of the audience who seemed convinced that Shiv is the worst character on the show. Worse than her brother Roman (Keiran Culkin), who overtly harrasses female staff members and actively and gleefully backs Nazi politicians. Worse than her other brother Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong), who also backs Nazi politicians (albeit less gleefully) and is responsible for the literal death of a waiter at her wedding. Whilst the audience have embraced Kendall and Roman as babygirls (that’s a whole other conversation) and complex characters, Shiv doesn’t get such grace. As far as they are concerned, Shiv is simply a bitch.
Not only is she a bitch, she’s an incompetent bitch. Admittedly, while the show has actively shown her fumbling in some pretty obvious business plays, it also shows her competence. She was competent enough at her political gig to force her titan of a father to make a deal with the Bernie Sanders analog, and she was incredibly competent at persuading a sexual assault victim not to testify in front of Congress. Of course, Kendall and Roman also make massive business fumbles throughout the show but they don’t get the same hatred as Shiv. While Shiv has been horrifically toxic towards her husband Tom (Matthew McFadyen), Kendall and Roman barely get any flack for the failures in their personal lives. Furthermore, Tom barely gets any flack for betraying Shiv and being a shameless social climber. All the issues in their marriage are her fault, she sucks at business and she sucks as a person.
Shiv Roy, the girlboss
“Tragic moment for women who watched Shiv be a gladiator for four seasons only to end up like this”
“There was a lot of misogyny throughout Succession, and I really thought it would pay off at the end, meaning shiv would get an upper hand somehow … i feel sick to my stomach”
In Season 2, when Shiv chopped off her hippie hair into a sleek long bob and started wearing pantsuits, a vocal minority started to materialise - the girlboss gang. In Season 1, Shiv was largely at the periphery of the business, but since season 2, when her father dangled the job of CEO in front of her like a carrot on a stick, she’s been on a mission. Gender be damned, Shiv Roy was on the hunt for the CEO job, and as a #feministicon #slayqueen #boss, she would do whatever it takes! If that means strong-arming sexual assault victims into silence, then that’s the feminist girlboss move she’s willing to take!
There’s a misconception that all female characters and all female representation is inherently feminist. Whilst you could argue there’s something feminist in creating such a complex female character, Shiv Roy as a person is not a feminist, and the viewers rooting for their girlboss to succeed didn’t seem to understand that. Like every other character, Shiv Roy is a terrible person. It’s not sexist to call her this, it’s simply the truth. Just as reducing her to a villain is reductive, reducing her to a feminist girlboss is a stale and lazy interpretation of the show. Not every female character has to be aspirational, not every fictional woman in business has to go on your mood board.
But wait, fellow Shivcels, there is a third, secret face of Shiv Roy.
Shiv Roy, the decider
Right, let's finally talk about the series finale. In the excellent conclusion to the series, the final decision about who would be CEO comes down to Shiv’s deciding vote; will they sell the company to GoJo, anointing Tom as top dog, or will they keep Watstar in Roy family hands and crown Kendall as King. Shiv enters the vote already defeated - she knows there’s no way she can ever be CEO and despite some earlier flip-flopping, she already swore allegiance to Kendall.
And yet.
At the very last second, having seen Kendall in the big chair pretending to be Logan, and having seen him bluster his way through the board meeting before the vote, Shiv gets cold feet. After a phenomenally painful temper tantrum by Kendall, she ends it and votes for GoJo. The siblings clawing for power is done, Waystar is no longer a family business, and Tom - slimy, shameless, romantic, Midwestern Tom - takes the throne.
Did she finally end the toxicity? Did she realise that Kendall was turning into a complete monster and destroyed him before he could do any more harm? Was it an act of love - some people on Twitter seem to think so. Maybe? But the truth is probably simpler than that.
“I don’t think you’d be good at it,” she tells Kendall, seconds before he rugby tackles his brother. And she’s right. Despite Kendall occasionally giving a good performance of Logan, he’s not Logan. She loves him, but she can't stomach him. Years of resentment that her father never took her seriously while he was grooming this incompetent child for the crown. Absolutely not.
However, this wasn’t an entirely victorious choice for Shiv. She watched her husband, who she never respected, take the role that she yearned for so deeply, and took her place as His Wife™. As they gingerly held hands in the car at the end of the episode, Shiv didn’t look satisfied. This wasn’t Lady Macbeth realising that she could manipulate her husband behind the scenes, this was Shiv realising that she is, and has always been A Woman. Her father never took her seriously because of her gender, so to retaliate, she tried her absolute hardest to become him. She took on his mannerisms and characteristics, and yet ultimately she ended up as her mother - second fiddle to a man who owns everything while she gets to bear his children. She is so desperate to be in the vicinity of power, she will become everything she resents.
Shiv is, without a doubt, one of the most fascinating characters to have ever graced the television landscape, and her final decision will be hotly debated for years. Hopefully, as more time passes, and the fancams and babygirlification eases - just as we can now see Skylar White, Carmella Soprano and Betty Draper as whole women - we will be able to view Shiv Roy as a whole, complex, interesting, complicated character.
One for the ages.