I swear, this expletive-laden show is more thrilling than ever!

SUCCESSION Sky Atlantic/Now TV ★★★★★

WARNING: This review contains very strong language from the outset and throughout.

Or at least it would if it quoted every zinging, stinging, hilariously scabrous insult and overreaction from the opening episode of Succession, returning for its final season.

A full transcript would require so many asterisks and dashes, this page would look like the screen of a 1980s Space Invaders machine.

The sweariest drama ever aired definitively refutes the old sneer that foul language is the last resort for people without education or imagination. Jesse Armstrong, the writer of Succession, uses AngloSaxon language with endless invention. To hear the F-word being used with such enthusiastic variation requires a real intellectual effort, just to keep up.

There’s the way Logan roy (Brian Cox) does it, with seething aggression and menace. His swearing leaves underlings bruised and winded.

As a business deal disintegrated, at the end of a bad-tempered birthday party, he gathered his lieutenants around him and invited them to rebuke him, like a drunk in a pub urging strangers to take a swing at him. When they reluctantly complied, Logan battered them with gutter curses.

Then there’s the way Logan’s youngest son, roman (Kieran Culkin), swears – with disturbing sexual undertones. When he uses the language of self-abuse and non-consensual assault, he means it literally.

An entire PhD is waiting to be written on the swearing in Succession, but whoever tackles that will need a deep knowledge of Freudian psychology... because every effing line of dialogue reflects the deep desire of Logan’s adult children to see him dead.

Daughter Shiv (Sarah Snook) understands him best. ‘ He wouldn’t be a good torturer,’ she mused. ‘He doesn’t have the patience.’

As the credits rolled, roman, Shiv and big brother Kendall (Jeremy Strong) had just bid $10billion for an ailing media conglomerate, solely to spite their father. They knew this was far more than the company was worth, enough to bankrupt them three times over, but they couldn’t help themselves.

‘Congratulations on saying the biggest number,’ Logan snarled down the phone. We left him slumped in an armchair, guzzling whisky and watching the news channel he owns himself, loathing everything and everyone. He was behaving bizarrely all night, walking out of his party to dine at a Central Park restaurant with his bodyguard Colin, and talking about the afterlife.

Logan doesn’t believe in one, of course. What could possibly come next, when he’s made existence a living hell for himself and all his family?

FOR Shiv and her downtrodden husband, Tom ( Matthew Macfadyen), what’s next appears to be a divorce neither of them wants. It would be a mistake, though, to underestimate how much misery Tom can soak up. Maybe Shiv will run out of cruel things to say . . . or maybe, as a tender moment of hand- holding between them hinted, she will stop wanting to say them.

Tom has another side, though. His bullying of cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) is hypnotically pathetic. When Greg bragged that he’d had sex with his date in one of Logan’s bedrooms, Tom convinced him the whole sordid episode had been caught in CCTV. ‘You’ve accidentally made him a sex tape,’ he smirked.

The fact that Tom behaves this way constantly and yet Macfadyen remains every viewer’s favourite actor is practically supernatural.

Succession has always used its locations cleverly. Whole episodes have been set on yachts, on private jets, in any place the ultra-rich go in search of privacy, such as Bavarian castles or desert hideaways.

This time, we returned to the scene of the debut episode, from 2018: a birthday party in Logan’s New York apartment. In that first show, the magnate was preparing to name one of his children as his successor, but couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he had a stroke in a helicopter. . . and woke up meaner than ever.

It’s surely no coincidence to see that scene reprised. Logan is no longer talking about a successor, it’s true. Everyone has betrayed him. ‘I’m 100 ft tall,’ he raged. ‘These people are pygmies.’

Even his manipulative, scheming wife Marcia has gone. ‘She’s in Milan, shopping. Forever,’ says his PA, Kerry (Zoe Winters), a woman in a Claudia Winkleman wig, who calls herself his ‘friend/assistant/adviser’.

BUT Logan is back where he was before the stroke, and he’s talking about death while staggering around like a corpse on roller skates. Might he actually be about to die?

For five years, watching Succession has been like staring into a kaleidoscope, where all the lurid pieces tumble around each other, in constantly changing patterns. It’s always different, but nothing ever really alters: Logan is always at the centre.

Perhaps this time, something radical is about to change. If Logan dies, Succession will finally fulfil the promise of its title, and become a civil war between the uncivil siblings.

The most vicious family drama ever seen on TV might be about to get even more thrillingly nasty.