I’m surprised the concept of “appointment television” even exists in the era of perpetual streaming, but every once in a while, a show enters the zeitgeist and doesn’t leave until all the episodes have aired. I guess we just like to be part of the conversation. And if there’s a candidate for the label right now, it’s definitely the new season of HBO’s rich-people-behaving-badly drama Succession, which ended its second season with a game-changing press conference (more exciting than it sounds), and has returned to best viewership numbers yet, according to HBO, anyway.
Succession is the darkly comic story of the Roy family, owners of media conglomerate Waystar RoyCo, and the chaos and backbiting that ensue when patriarch Logan (Brian Cox) suffers a stroke, prompting the family to begun fighting over what will remain after his inevitable demise. Prior to his medical incident, Logan has just given his third wife a say in his succession plans and elevated an estranged nephew to a position of power in the company, setting the stage for a (slightly less bloody) modern-day Game of Thrones scenario. It’s all very HBO.
Why should we care about what happens to these rich people and their evil company? Narratives about the ultra-wealthy being shitty or generally indifferent to the plight of us regular folk are common enough, but not inherently entertaining; we get enough of that in real life, thanks very much. Rich people being shitty to other rich people, though? That’s entertainment, and is very much the appeal of something like Succession. We live in a country in which a handful of people—no smarter, more virtuous, or hard-working than the mass of Americans—have more money than than god (practically speaking), so much that they have no idea what to do with it. If a TV show wants to tell us they are still miserably unhappy, well, that’s a shred of schadenfreude to cling to, anyway.
Some of these 18 series and movies border on wealth porn—the pleasure of watching people with nice clothes and fancy stuff who live in giant houses (I’m a Downton Abbey guy, so no judgements)—but most of them are about how the rich and powerful are at least as terrible as the rest of us, even if they have better shoes.