
Succession
2018 · TV Series
DramaComedy
A family drama about a media empire that masquerdes as sharp corporate satire but delivers something much more visceral. This is really about watching people you recognize—maybe even people you are—slowly destroy themselves and everyone around them in pursuit of love they'll never receive.
How it feels
Like being trapped at the world's most expensive family dinner where everyone speaks in code and every conversation is simultaneously about nothing and everything that matters. The show maintains a constant simmer of dread punctuated by moments of such acute secondhand embarrassment that you'll find yourself pausing to recover. It's deeply funny until it's suddenly devastating, often in the same scene.
What makes it heavy
The emotional violence is relentless and precise. These characters weaponize vulnerability and turn intimacy into strategy, all while desperately craving the genuine connection they systematically destroy. Watching brilliant people make catastrophically stupid decisions in pursuit of a father's approval that will never come creates a particular kind of exhaustion.
Compared to shows you may know
-The Crown → Where that show treats power as burden, this treats it as drug addiction.
-Veep → Both skewer political ambition, but this one makes you feel complicit in the cruelty.
-Mad Men → Where Don Draper runs from his past, these characters weaponize theirs.
-Game of Thrones → Similar power games, but here the real violence happens at the dinner table.
If Mad Men felt like watching someone slowly drown, this feels like watching someone choose to keep swimming toward deeper water
Worth knowing
The humor often comes from watching characters inflict genuine psychological damage on each other. People dealing with complicated family dynamics or corporate trauma might find certain conversations uncomfortably familiar.