Succession, HBO’s biting satire of corporate power struggles at a family-run conservative media conglomerate, could have ended up just a simple parody of the Fox News empire—think VeepThe Murdochs, however. This series follows Logan Roy’s journey and struggles as he searches for his successor. He is supported by his children Shiv, Kendall and Roman. A rotating cast of functionaries at high levels, including some who may be on the cusp of the throne, supports him.
The show doesn’t care as much about mocking conservative Fox News politics, which they view largely as a simple business proposition. It is more interested in showing the flaws in well-paid coastal elites who live in miserable and pathetic luxury lives that they want to preserve.
The Roy kids are a mix of unself-aware and unserious: Roman is a fool; Shiv is vain and shallowly left-leaning; Kendall is weak-willed and an ex-drug addict. Connor is a bumbling trust fund loser who clearly has no political aspirations.
Their handlers don’t do much better. Although the Roy children are slightly better than them, they spend most of their time trying to avoid responsibility and blame. Nobody wants to be responsible for anything.
Thus, Succession is not so much the story of a powerful right-wing news operation as it is a spoof of America’s self-obsessed, self-dealing elites, in which a brash and abusive (yet ambitious and successful) patriarch finds himself handing the reins to a feckless younger generation that has no real goals beyond avoiding risk.