When depicting the world of the super rich, it’s hard to play your cards right. There is the risk, on the one hand, of creating grandiose characters so alien they are in no way relatable to an audience; on the other, there is the danger of glamourising this pernicious and parasitical world in all of its staggering excess. 

Not many who attempt to broach this subject fully stick the landing, with the topic often being relegated to the bombastic world of reality TV, among the likes of The Real Housewives and the Kardashians. Even Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), though critical of exuberant wealth and greed, frames much of its yuppie subject’s lifestyle as glamorous.

What, then, makes HBO’s Succession different? On paper, it covers much of the same thing, following the lives of the wealthy Roy family as ageing patriarch Logan (Brian Cox) contemplates who the successor to his vast media empire will be from among his children: Connor (Alan Ruck), Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Roman (Kieran Culkin) and Shiv (Sarah Snook). With the bumbling Connor away, the main battle of wills ensues between the seeming heir Kendall, puckish Roman and strong-willed Shiv. The show itself is filmed in cool blues and beiges, as the camera zooms in on characters in unassuming black suits moving through board rooms.  As a pitch, it’s not riveting. Yet, this is one of the most captivating shows on television; Succession just swept the Golden Globes once more.

"Family is dangerous in Succession, and intimacy always comes with a sinister undercurrent"

It is the characters of Succession that cement the show’s calibre. They are conniving, cringeworthy and cruel; they are vulnerable, funny and sympathetic. They feel like more fully realised human beings than most programmes can hope to achieve and they are the reason fans return week after week to Succession. Despite Kendall’s toe-curlingly embarrassing rapping and performative liberalism, viewers are rocked by the depth of his sadness and inability to resolve his trauma. Roman is something of an alt-right troll, but his struggle to win his Father’s approval is deeply humane and the audience feels Kendall’s brotherly rage when Logan hits him. We know Shiv is unfaithful and emotionally manipulates her husband, but her faults are tempered by her intense frustration about being constantly sidelined and undervalued due to her gender. 

Family is dangerous in Succession, and intimacy always comes with a sinister undercurrent. Any softness brings up the perennial question that hangs over the intention of all the show’s main characters: what’s the play? No act of love can be genuine for those in the Roy family, save for a handful of moments between the siblings. 

When Logan hugs Kendall in the season one finale and murmurs “you’re my boy, you’re my number one boy”  into his crying son’s hair, it brings to mind Goya’s image of Saturn Devouring One of His Sons. Logan leverages the idea of love as a way to pull his children’s strings, ensuring he’s always at the top of the pile; it is a show about an abusive father, manipulating his children by dangling the hope that he might one day choose them, might love them the most. Succession thus gets audiences to emotionally invest by revealing a cycle of abuse that ripples outwards into all aspects of the show, with Logan at the centre. 

"The glamour of wealth is illusory; this excess makes no one happy, yet everyone wants more"

Nothing is at the centre of succession. The power that Logan hoards is a black hole; money is so excessive as to become meaningless. Words are reduced to “complicated airflow”, bastardised by excessive profanity and some wonderfully creative metaphors (“that’s about as choreographed as a dog getting f****d on roller skates” stands out as a personal favourite). The characters constantly wonder if what they are being told is real. Perhaps most harrowingly, the working class victims of Waystar Royco’s institutional abuse are referred to as “NRPIs” (“no real person involved”). 


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As Megan Garber notes in her article ‘The Bodily Horrors of Succession, physical wealth is almost never attractive: a festering raccoon carcass stinks out Logan’s favourite getaway in the Hamptons; mites live in the infected sand imported for a dismal play written by Connor’s girlfriend, and Kendall wakes up smeared in his own faeces after a cocaine binge. The glamour of wealth is illusory; this excess makes no one happy, yet everyone wants more. Everyone wants to win. 

Perhaps, then, there is something at the heart of Succession: capitalism. A great yawning void of consumption into which the Roys are pulled, and into which everyone seems to be trying to get. Characters scrabble up the ladder to reach the top, to achieve the success that the show’s title promises. But, the closer they get to that power, the more hollow they seem to feel. At the centre, Logan has so much of everything it begins to feel inconsequential, like nothing. But as of the end of season three, Kendall, Shiv and Roman have lost almost all of their power. For the first time, they have nothing but each other. But maybe that’s everything they need.