- October 1, 2021
- Posted by: Stratford Team
- Category: Business
“I thought my family was fucked up,” says a character in the forthcoming third series of Succession. “This is next level.” That’s an understatement: Succession seems to be the penthouse of dramas, far above ordinary means and mayhem.
Yet the Emmy-winning HBO show does not imagine what could go wrong in family empires; it plasters together what has gone wrong in case after case in real life, and applies a glorious gloss of wordplay and satire. In Succession, history really does repeat itself, the second time as farce and much more enjoyable.
The show centres on the Roys, a plutocratic media family grappling with two biological facts: the patriarch will die, and none of his children is his clone. (This article contains spoilers for seasons one and two.) In the very first episode, billionaire Logan Roy has a stroke — before naming a successor. He joins a very large club. Medieval kings were desperate to produce an heir; their modern equivalents…
