There are no heroes in Succession, HBO's darkly comic drama about a cohort of wealthy, privileged media-business strivers, all of whom are rather unpleasant, or at the very least deeply pathetic in some way. But the show does have something like a villain, in the form of Logan Roy, the aging, raging patriarch whose Foxlike media business, Waystar Royco, is the empire all of the show's other characters seek in one way or another to control.
Yet Logan Roy is also the lynchpin of the series, the prime mover in a cast of rich and nominally successful yet essentially feeble and gutless wannabes. And therein lies Succession's central critique of our era: It's a show about the uneasy and uncertain transition of power and authority from an awful yet decisive and pivotal elder generation that has held on for too long to a younger cohort that lacks Logan's gumption: The show corrals a cast of influencers from the worlds of media, tech, money, and politics, all of whom have the trappings of success and ready access to real power—but neither the vision nor the will to effectively wield it.
