During the first season of HBO’s “Succession,” which wrapped up on Sunday night, Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) revealed himself to be a savvy courier, an awkward courtier, a stoic whipping boy, a farcical chaperone, a cunning rat, a brilliant mercenary, and an essential presence. He’s the Fool in the scheme of its gloss on “King Lear” and the surrogate for a viewer navigating the intrigues of his ultra-rich relations in the series’s Roy family. “My mom’s a Roy,” Greg says to a receptionist, while fumbling his way up to a cubicle at the media conglomerate Waystar Royco. He himself is a Hirsch. His grandpa is the estranged brother of the media mogul Logan Roy (Brian Cox), the chairman and C.E.O. of the firm, which makes Greg the beneficiary of textbook nepotism. Logan’s children—Greg’s first cousins once removed—are entitled to behave like twits, jerks, and manslaughtering monsters. They measure their success in bragging rights, abstract ego boosts, and nine-figure sums. Greg, by contrast, is just trying to hold down a job.
He is introduced, in the first episode, on the verge of flunking out of the company’s international management-training program, during the “theme-park tour” portion of his apprenticeship. High on weed inside an itchy costume, laid low by brattish children, he throws up, his vomit seeping through the character’s eye holes. The hilarious moment of cartoonish grotesquerie is somehow apt: even with his peepers weeping puke, Greg is always paying close attention. Observing his world with an outsider’s hungry eye while moving through it with the dumb luck of a charmed rube, he gathers profitable knowledge—at points, he holds more information about the sprawl of corporate and personal betrayals than any other character on “Succession.” He is peripheral to the power plays but central to its overarching structure.
Through his gaze, we saw early evidence that Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong), Logan’s supposed heir as the company’s top dog, would be betrayed by his investor and close friend Stewy (Arian Moayed). We also saw the hip of Kendall’s sister, Shiv (Sarah Snook), caressed by her illicit lover and understood that a confrontation between Shiv and her soon-to-be-husband, Tom Wamsgans (Matthew Macfadyen), was in the offing. We savored the irony when, early in his tenure at Waystar’s New York headquarters, Greg sat at his desk watching a corporate video praising diversity while also scanning the pale faces of gray men filing out of a meeting. Once an episode, Greg’s point of view ascended so that he seems to be both the Nick Carraway and the T. J. Eckleburg of the narrative.
Tom proved to be both Greg’s mentor and his tormentor, schooling the kid in status markers and—especially—in dominance displays, in exchanges that suggest the initiation of a fraternity pledge, in order to commission him to do dirty work. It was Greg who destroyed evidence of systematic felonies perpetrated with the firm’s cruise-ship line. In Episode 9, Logan’s second wife remembers him as “Greg the egg,” a childhood nickname earned on account of an adorable kind of ovoid meekness. In Episode 10, the egg hatches plans: “Greg the motherfucking egg,” Kendall says, admiringly, after the kid offers a Machiavellian reminder, tantamount to blackmail, that he knows where some bodies are buried. The character first emerged as a fan favorite partly because he is, in terms of his relationship with power, the most relatable of the central characters. Initially, his grovelling was pitiable. (When Logan, misremembering his name, called him “Cousin Craig,” Greg cheerfully accommodated the slight: “I’ll answer to both!”) But his hold on our affections tightened as it became clear that the bumbler is a bounder. His moral lapses are on the scale of mortals, not masters of the universe. This hall-of-fame naïf is sympathetic in his hustling. He’s a boy maturing into a company man.
