In debates over who is the least competent sibling, arguments for which actor’s performance is best and theories around how it’s all going to end, one question dogs social media discussion about Succession: which character are you rooting for? The HBO drama surrounding the Murdoch-esque family the Roys, fighting among themselves over who will become CEO of their media empire, has become a weekly lightning rod for debate in its final season (which ends on Monday). It’s normal to wake up on a Monday to a viral Twitter thread, Reddit or TikTok post putting forward a case for the morality of one of Succession’s main characters.
The problem with these competing theories should be obvious to anyone who’s watched the show: every character on Succession is an irredeemably bad person.
Be it Logan, the cruel and uncaring patriarch; any of his kids, each greedy, self-involved and violent in their own special way; or even the cast of secondary characters, all desperate sycophants operating entirely based on what will get them closer to power – the show is a conveyor belt of the worst human impulses. But it’s not just Succession: on TV today, highbrow dramas are filled with casts of unlikable characters. From Industry to The White Lotus, “prestige television” has become synonymous with knowing the people you’re watching are, on the whole, mostly bad.
You can see why this is happening now. Shows full of these detestable characters – and in particular Succession – have come as a welcome relief for viewers who spent much of the last decade being preached to by soapy dramas with clear moral centres and/or obvious antiheroes (think: Orange Is the New Black, House of Cards, Master of None). The carefully drawn depravity baked into each of the Roys feels like an honest version of reality, without opportunistic sensationalism.
While this trend has accelerated, a crevasse has opened up between the two types of most popular TV, with these prestige dramas where no one is a good person sitting at one end while the other is occupied by “nicecore” shows – like Ted Lasso or Abbott Elementary – where everyone is. The latter is full of peppy, saccharine characters who spend their time overcoming easy obstacles that teach viewers lessons about love and friendship they already know. These shows’ plotlines aren’t only unchallenging – with happy endings expected and baked in – they increasingly act as mini-moral infomercials, where characters give seemingly random monologues about consent, bullying and the importance of “feeling your feelings”.
Flawed good people are much harder to capture than near-perfect ones or shallow supervillains (it’s also easier said than done to create a balanced portrayal of good and bad without cloying sweetness or cliche). This isn’t to say there should be some plucky hero trying to stick up for the little guy on Succession, or two people in a perfectly well-adjusted relationship on The White Lotus – that would ruin these thoughtfully curated ensembles. But within the current landscape there’s little of this mixed morality on screen being done well. Audiences are often left choosing between the worst of humanity or a syrupy overdose of the best of it.
But the new wave of apparently morality-free dramas do offer something that the alternative – shows about horrible people that ask you to simply judge them – would not. The increasingly saturated genre of shows and films “skewering” the rich adopted an instructive overtone where wealthy people are hammily portrayed as one-dimensional cartoon villains, such as in the now-canned Gossip Girl reboot or the recent Netflix film, Glass Onion, resulting in flat, predictable dramas. Viewers even appeared to prefer the second season of The White Lotus to the first after it dropped this tone from its writing, giving its characters greater moral complexity and less moralising (which yielded a far more interesting story).
And perhaps this is partly why, even with the objective ugliness that defines each of the Roys and their nauseating counterparts, there is a pervasive belief among much of Succession’s audience that there still must be someone on the show for them to root for. Checking social media after each episode has become a game of seeing how far tens of thousands of viewers will go to argue that an abominable character – whether it’s a Nazi sympathiser, a narcissist, a killer, or some combination of all three – is merely flawed. This impulse is so insurmountable that many people who can clearly see the bad still find themselves grappling around these casts trying to sniff out a shred of good.
Even if itself a flawed instinct, the persistence of this impulse is a large part of what makes Succession so successful. Its greatest trick is getting us to feel empathy for its characters in spite of their evident evil – characters who would happily ruin our lives in exchange for an inch of influence. It’s why, as the series ends, many viewers are already “pre-grieving” this show that managed to make a group of such bad people watchable – for some, even beloved. In its wake, we should expect to see casts like these more often, but we shouldn’t hold our breath for something that replicates its delicate, depraved balance.
Sarah Manavis is an American writer covering technology, culture and society
