The case for betting on Tom Wambsgans' Succession

MIDWAY THROUGH THE THIRD SEASON of Succession, Tom Wambsgans tells his underling and cousin by marriage, Greg Hirsch, a colorful anecdote from an empire in decline. “Sporus was a young slave boy—he was Nero’s favorite,” Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) explains.

- JUDY BERMAN

“Well, Nero pushed his wife down the stairs, and then he had Sporus castrated, and he married him instead. And he gave him a ring, and he made him dress up like his dead wife.” The takeaway: “I’d castrate you and marry you in a heartbeat.”

In the HBO dramedy’s Season 3 finale, Tom sets that prophecy in motion. An executive at Waystar Royco—the media behemoth led by Brian Cox’s cutthroat octogenarian patriarch, Logan Roy—and the husband of the boss’s daughter Shiv Roy (Sarah Snook), he does the corporate equivalent of pushing his wife down the stairs. When she alerts him that she and her brothers Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) are teaming up to block Logan from selling the business, which would jeopardize what the siblings see as their birthright, Tom turns around and warns Logan. Which raises a question, going into the show’s fourth and final season: Could Tom Wambsgans be the successor Logan is looking for?