Everyone hates Tom Wambsgans. Well, in-universe anyway. The Succession audience, at least, has always had a soft spot for the character christened Princess Diana by stan forums over the past four seasons. Tom Wambsgans – and Kendall, of course – is baby girl to us. But to the characters of the Waystar Royco universe, nobody likes Tom Wambsgans. Why? Because Tom Wambsgans is a social climber. At the beginning of the HBO show’s final season, his striving nature is encapsulated by a brutal evisceration delivered to him by Karl when he so much as floats the very idea of becoming CEO: “You’re a clumsy interloper and no one trusts you. The only guy pulling for you is dead, and now you’re just married to the ex-boss’s daughter, and she doesn’t even like you. And you are fair and squarely fucked.”
A few episodes later, Tom Wambsgans is CEO. How did that happen? A better question might be: how did we miss that it was always going to happen?
Succession’s audiences have spent the past four seasons – with varying degrees of success and media literacy skills – trying to predict who will succeed Logan Roy. The mistake we’ve always made is that we, generally speaking, consider the show to be a parable inspired by King Lear, the Shakespearean tragedy telling the story of monarchical dynasties. If you take the show to be a modern day version, it makes sense that the winner would emerge from one of the Roy children (most people thought it would be Kendall). But Logan Roy wasn’t a king. Logan was a nobody from Scotland who corrupted his soul in a lifelong tunnel vision pursuit of tremendous wealth. Kings and Princes are born wealthy. Royalty is created by birth. Logan Roy created himself. And so did Tom Wambsgans.
From the beginning of the show Tom is set out as apart, gauche, an arriviste. He can’t decide on a good present for Logan’s birthday, and eventually buys him an expensive watch, telling him – a billionaire! – how expensive it was. When he eventually convinces Siobhan to marry him, his family make another social faux pas at the wedding by boasting about how much they paid for the wine. Tom’s relationship with money is uneasy and new, and so even when he marries into Roy wealth, even when he secures his own line of succession by getting Shiv pregnant, he’ll never truly be one of them. And they never let him forget it. Shiv makes fun of his blindingly white, obviously new trainers, bought specifically to impress Matsson in Norway. Shiv calls him a “conservative hick”. “I’m telling you, new money”, Kendall jokes later in the season. “You gotta hold those fresh bills to the light.” In four seasons Tom has moved himself from cruises to ATN and then CEO of the whole damn thing, but he’ll never be, to paraphrase Logan, a “serious person” in the eyes of the kids who grew up watching their billionaire parents run over au pairs in their Maybachs.
Yet it’s Tom’s inherent, unavoidable difference that ultimately secured his fate as winner. Because he wasn’t born into wealth; because, like Logan before him, he had to sacrifice family and morality and debase himself (Boar on the floor, watching Shiv conduct an affair under his nose at his own wedding), Tom fucking grafts. “I’m a grinder”, he tells Matsson in the final episode, arguably the one time we really see him reveal his true character. “I grind because I worry all night. I worry all night about everything.” Tom reveals himself as having an excess of vigilance, a high tolerance for discomfort. We, as the audience, already knew this. We already knew that Tom worried constantly, worked constantly, because for him the stakes were a little more real-life than they would ever be for the Roy kids, for whom the game was simply the game. When Matsson tells Kendall he just wanted to make him rich, Kendall shrugs “already rich”. But Tom didn’t start the show already rich. At least, not rich by Roy standards. Tom grafts. Tom missed Logan’s funeral because he was too busy working the election at ATN. Kendall showed up to Logan’s 80th birthday party, leaving an acquisition deal in the eleventh hour. Which one seems better suited to run the company?
In his constant striving, Tom Wambsgans is probably the purest distillation of true American grit and capitalism that Succession has to offer us. Although the show has a transatlantic writing team, I think the rest of the Roy children are pretty British-coded, and not just because they have a Home Counties mum and convincing mimicry skills when they’re licking their step-dad’s forbidden fridge cheese. American money is new, British money is old. Americans build, Brits inherit. Americans reinvent themselves, shed their old skins, rise to the top, take pictures with tech giants and assert their right as CEO. In Britain, class is embedded deeper. It doesn’t matter that Kate Middleton is royalty now, in the collective British psyche she’ll still have an ex-air hostess mother nicknamed “Prepare Doors For Landing”. “England is the most class-ridden country under the sun,” wrote George Orwell. “It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.” Is it any wonder Logan fled and reinvented himself? Is it any wonder he saw something of himself in the son-in-law morally bankrupting himself to do the same, rather than his deeply unserious transatlantic princeling children?
Tom, despite the irony of being portrayed by a British actor (like Logan!) is very much an emblem of new world order. “Greg, this is not fucking Charles Dickens World, okay?” Tom says to his underling in an earlier episode. “You don’t go around talking about principles. Man the fuck up!” How could it ever not be Tom? If the rest of Succession’s characters are Shakespearean, Tom Wambsgans is dreamt up by Tom Wolfe. If Kendall is Christ-like, Tom is Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko. Aside from Logan Roy, it’s Tom, not Kendall, who is the killer, who knows that greed is good. Who’ll abandon his childhood friends for a billionaire boys club stag do. Who’ll install a fascist in the White House. Who’ll go to prison. Who’ll lie to a Congressional committee. Who’ll exist, maybe forever, in a loveless morganatic marriage. Our surprise following the finale, if we experience it at all, isn’t our own. If we’re surprised at all by Tom’s stratospheric rise to the top – if we ignored the internet trivia that told us he was named after a baseball player who made history as the only person in the world series to make an unassisted triple play – it’s only because Succession’s writers have lulled us into the false security of seeing the world through the eyes of the entitled, unserious Roy children.
As the show’s finale came closer, more of Succession’s online fan communities began to speculate that a more fitting Shakespearean comparison is not King Lear but Othello – the relationship between Desdemona and Othello sharing a lot of similarities to that of Tom and Shiv. Like Tom and Shiv, Desdemona and Othello are kind of, probably, sort of in love. As in love as their characters can allow. But they’re supposed to read as mismatched, and Othello’s insecurity (he can’t understand why someone like her would love someone like him) dooms their relationship from the off. Othello says: “My parts, my title, and my perfect soul / Shall manifest me rightly.” Tom waits four seasons to finally admit to Shiv that part of his attraction to her is borne out of his need to be “comfortable”.
Once he does admit his true character though, we should have been able to predict what happened this weekend. Kendall might have broken down in a boardroom over how much he felt he deserved this, but Tom – who never would have done the same, despite what he might feel – is actually the deserving one. Tom is a striver. When Matsson tells him he “doesn’t want a partner”, it doesn’t faze him. Tom Wambsgans already knows he’ll never be their equal. Who needs equality when you’re at the top?