Filthy Rich: The Power Plays of <em>Succession</em>
Watching HBO’s new series Succession, I found myself thinking about a Saturday Night Live sketch from 2016 mocking television’s recent spate of sad-eyed, award-winning dramedies. The segment was a fake promo for Broken, a bleak new Thursday-night series on CBS about a family of professors who are all diagnosed with depression on the same day. But: “Because it’s 30 minutes, it’s a comedy!”
If an abundance of recent hit shows often feel like dramas structurally shoehorned into a comedic configuration, is the opposite: It’s a black workplace satire stretched into an hourlong format and polished to a prestige-TV sheen. It deals in family empires, dynastic often feels less like than or , with a crew of inept, profane, and poisonously ambitious individuals jostling to claw their way up the greasy pole of power.
