FORCING MYSELF TO WATCH SUCCESSION

I forced myself to finish the last season of Succession, a venomous spectacle of rich siblings ripping each other to shreds. Succession is the best critically-acclaimed show I couldn’t stand to watch. Not just disliked—hated. Watching it was excruciating, like willingly stepping on a Lego over and over again. The plot? Thin and stagnant, a slow-motion shark tank of sociopaths jockeying for the top spot in their dad’s empire. They rose and fell not from strategy but as if some capricious god was rolling dice behind the scenes. Shame and truth were foreign concepts to them. These weren’t mere narcissists; they were full-blown solipsists, their self-absorption so relentless it crushed any hope for real plot twists. Their behavior was less cunning and more clockwork: predictable, joyless, inevitable.

And yet, I endured. I forced myself to watch this spectacle of feral appetites clashing like crocodiles over a wildebeest carcass. Why? Because Succession felt like a forbidden window into a gilded world where humanity’s worst impulses roamed free, unchecked by the civilizing guardrails the rest of us adhere to (if only because we can’t afford not to). The show wasn’t just a car crash—it was a multicar pileup filmed in slow motion, designed to scratch our voyeuristic itch.

In the end, Succession is a mirror held up to the grotesque, the rich and shameless shriveling into their own private hells without a flicker of self-awareness. It feeds our appetite for schadenfreude, letting us revel in their misery while secretly thanking the heavens that our own lives, for all their flaws, don’t include daily battles for dominance over a media conglomerate—or the soul-crushing emptiness that comes with it.