Taki Taki

Succession gets the rich and powerful all wrong

Caption: Brian Cox as villainous patriarch Logan Roy in the HBO hit Succession. Credit: LANDMARK MEDIA / Alamy Stock Photo

They have stepped into the pop-culture spotlight via the HBO hit Succession, a hatchet job on the very rich and powerful produced by the very rich and much more powerful Adam McKay (The Big Short). McKay started off by doing a lot of cheesy comedies, made a large fortune, and then went after Wall Street types. Nothing wrong with that; films are supposed to go after the rich and powerful, and always have. It’s the media’s coverage of a TV series about a fictional family that is slanted and totally false.

The media hint that the mogul and patriarch Logan Roy is based on Rupert Murdoch, and that Roy’s dysfunctional family represents Rupert’s. In reality, the Roy bunch are freaks and drug addicts who are incapable of getting anything right. Unfortunately for envious hacks, the Murdoch brood is the direct opposite: attractive, active and successful in their jobs. They are as far removed from the fictional Roys as it’s possible to be. Still, green-eyed hacks persist in suggesting that these freaks are based on the Aussie clan. Go figure, as they used to say in American Samoa.

The writer of the show is a Brit, Jesse Armstrong, and article after article praises him as being a superior human being for getting the very rich right. Actually, Armstrong is a good salesman of pulp fiction, and not much more. His knowledge of the very rich is probably based on cheap novels and gossip columns. I had never heard of him until now, and wonder who the richest person he’s ever met is. He says that he is keen to avoid writing ‘wealth porn’ and glamorising the Roys’ lifestyle, which sounds to me like a stripper lamenting that she has to take her clothes off every night.

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