'Succession' and 'The Righteous Gemstones' both explore the concept of the faildaughter in fascinating, thoughtful ways.
By now, readers are surely familiar with the concept of a “failson”: the son of a wealthy or powerful person who can’t measure up to their parents. Even if they don’t know the term by name, they’ve read enough news about Jared Kushner or Hunter Biden or even Chet Hanks to know one when they see one. A failson may float through life coasting on their dad’s money, or they may try to make a name for themselves in their own right, but no amount of privilege or nepotism can earn them respect.
Shiv, with her polished demeanor and moderate politics, presents herself to the public as a calm, stable alternative to her monstrous father and mercurial brothers. This is mostly a self-serving calculation on her part, but it’s not entirely untrue. While she’s hardly a moral paragon, she has more scruples than her father, Logan , or her brother, Roman .
Shiv and Judy are both quintessential faildaughters, children of immense privilege who are eternally frustrated by a combination of sexism and their own shortcomings. But Succession and Gemstones have something deeper to say about family, privilege, and trauma; to get to the bottom of it, it’s worth asking whether Shiv or Judy is the greater faildaughter. Two different approaches yield two different answers.
Shiv was not loved unconditionally. While she was lucky enough to be the daughter of a billionaire, that billionaire was Logan Roy, an emotionally abusive tyrant who gave and withheld affection in order to instill his brutal Darwinist worldview in his children. This wreaked havoc on her self-esteem, warped her views on interpersonal relationships, and made her desperate to both escape her father’s shadow and do anything to please him.
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