‘Succession’ Ratchets Up the Tension, Italian Style, in Season Finale

variety.com:

Lesley O'Toole Director and executive producer Mark Mylod shares more with his “Succession” creator/showrunner Jesse Armstrong than British roots — notably, a determination to push their critically lauded HBO drama’s bar ever higher.

Like the show’s first two season finales, helmed by Mylod in the U.K. and Croatia respectively, its latest — “All the Bells Say” — brims with conflict in a foreign land.

This time, the characters navigate Italy, as the futures of the Roys’ media conglomerate, Waystar Royco, and some of its key players become unmoored, ahead of a shocking denouement.  “I have remained the production flag-waver for scope and cinematic scale,” observes Mylod, who directs each season’s finale episodes and pushed for international locales to reveal “the global nature of our billionaires’ existence.”  While he had likely planned for the palpable oppression blown in by hot, dusty Tuscany, he did not expect a windstorm to help make an already-difficult pivotal scene one of the “hardest” he has yet overseen on the show.

As Logan (Brian Cox) struggles to settle on his empire’s future and determine which of his ruthless children — Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook), Roman (Kieran Culkin) and Connor (Alan Ruck) — will remain involved, the three youngest scions meet to plot strategy, but instead stumble on their best approximation of sibling intimacy.