At the end of March, the fourth and final season of "Heirs" started, and today the last episode was released. After the first season, it became clear that this project would become one of the immortal classics of HBO — along with "The Sopranos Clan", "Wiretap" and "True Detective". If you haven't watched the series yet, then you're in luck: you have 39 episodes of true greatness ahead of you.
"Heirs" tells about a family that cannot divide a multinational corporation. And if at the beginning of the series it seems that the characters are thinking about wealth and power, then by the middle of the season it becomes obvious that they just want to hurt each other. The Roy family are crippled people. Childhood traumas and resentments that have been lurking throughout life are exposed when Father Logan is about to die. The children share his company, not yet knowing that nothing is shining for them. When a man comes to his senses, he is ready to take revenge on those who have been plotting behind his back.
In theory, the plot of the celestial Swarms can easily be lowered to the ground. The heroes could share a two—room apartment in Samara or a night stall with the same frenzy - this is a story of eternal confrontation and unrealized ambitions. Each family member is so offended by others that he is not ready to give up the conflict. Kendall wants to take over the company not because he needs it— he just wants to prove that he is able to run the corporation as well as his father. Logan, in turn, is not ready to give the whole life's work to children, because he considers them incompetent and characterless.
Years of cynicism, on which the family was literally nurtured, do not allow the heroes to be sincere — and without this they cannot forgive each other. Perhaps a more mundane series would show a way out of the situation, but "Heirs" is a great work because they are not looking for simple answers — the conflict itself is interesting.
From the very first episode, "The Heirs" demonstrate what the old, classic HBO is: a hand-shaking camera, incredible costumes and a continuous live conversation. The episodes are long conversations, most of them involve a lot of characters. Each is beautiful in itself, therefore, by the fourth season, endless dialogues do not bother.
Perhaps this is due to the fact that all the characters have their own speech — even the obscene vocabulary is different, which is used by different characters, not to mention how they build sentences and wedge themselves into the conversation. Almost every scene involving Logan ends with a shout of Fuck off, emphasizing his status and conceit. Of course, accents also play a role: the actors literally learned to speak English that suits their characters. Of course, the hardest part was for Australian Sarah Snook and Briton Matthew McFadyen, who played Shiv and Tom, respectively.
The dialogues turned out to be lively and because of improvisation. She made conversations more natural, with hesitations, sincere surprise and strange words.
"Heirs" has a scattering of completely different, but equally interesting characters. There are no positive and negative ones among them, they are complex, and therefore cause a lot of emotions. Broken, but arrogant Kendall, stupid, but tragic Connor, Greg, who reached the heights, or Tom, who was confused in feelings and desires — each character turned out not only memorable, but also as important as possible. And secondary persons add to the story of emotions and meaning: it is difficult to imagine the "Heirs" without Jerry or Stewie, even if they do not appear on the screen so often.
The spirit of the Roy family also plays a huge role. Hopeless cynicism and selfishness spoil every person who enters the inner circle of the main characters.
Logan Roy is a supercapitalist from the Chamber of Weights and Measures. Someone will admire him as a man who created a giant multibillion-dollar corporation from scratch and always adhered to his principles. The other will hate him as a greedy exploiter who is able to convert human relations into currency. The type itself is described so vividly that you want to watch it regardless of the attitude towards it.
For four seasons, the "Heirs" hint that the world of old money is ending. Logan Roy serves as a kind of embodiment of this world. At the same time, the approach of the end may take a long time. The series demonstrates rather the fear of the hypothetical Logan Roy not to withstand the conditions of modernity, but hints that there will be no changes. It is not the event that is more important here, but the neurosis of waiting for it. The "heirs" could play along with the current agenda and tell that the old money bags will be punished, looted and further down the list, but the series says something else: only their kind can destroy them.
In recent years, a lot of TV series have been released with an excellent soundtrack — from "Game of Thrones" with epic music by Ramin Javadi to "Atlanta", which captured the fashionable (at the time of the release of the first season) sound of southern hip-hop. But even against this background, the soundtrack of "Heirs" seems to be something unattainable. Composer Nicholas Britell explained that he was trying to make music both majestic and ironic. The case when it is better to hear a melody once than to read about it a hundred times (although it is even better to hear it a hundred times).
