The Cold Truth at the Heart of ‘Succession,’ Lying on an Airplane Floor

NYT OPINION: The Cold Truth at the Heart of ‘Succession,’ Lying on an Airplane Floor
By Michelle Goldberg
Section: Opinion
Source: New York Times
Published Date: April 10, 2023 at 03:00AM

The comforting fantasy that the rich are miserable.

One dark pleasure of HBO’s “Succession” is that, in a plutocratic age, it makes having an obscene fortune look like a curse. This worldview is reflected in the relentless corporate blandness of its aesthetic, one that mostly eschews wealth porn for a soulless series of S.U.V. back seats, badly lit conference rooms, private airport terminals and generic lofts. (The show’s cinematographer once described it as “the anti-‘Billions,’” referring to the Showtime series that regularly dwells on the rarefied indulgences of its hedge fund antiheroes.) But the perspective is reflected even more in the show’s emotional austerity, its vision of a world in which love is almost always a weakness. Despite the extreme affluence, there is not a single person in “Succession” worth envying.
As the most recent episode of the final season makes clear, this very much applies to Logan Roy, the titan at the show’s center. (Stop reading now if you want to avoid spoilers.) It’s not just that Logan dies — it was pretty obvious that was coming; eventually, a show called “Succession” was going to have a succession. And Logan’s mortality was very much on his mind in the season’s first episode, when he stalked out of his joyless birthday party to go to a diner with his bodyguard, whom he called, pitiably, his “best pal.” “You think there’s anything after all this?” asked Logan, before saying: “I don’t think so. I think this is it.”

Read more at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/10/opinion/succession-logan-wealth.html