Succession's satire can't succeed without realism: Logan Roy is too dumb to be a media titan

The Daily Beast

"What was intended to be a searing satire of a megalomaniac media mogul and his fratricidal progeny has been fatally undermined by the absence of any grasp of what a media mogul actually has to do for a living," says Clive Irving. "Setting aside, for a moment, the ethical issues raised by the job specification—the scope for exercising undue influence on the polity—it’s not just enough to be a megalomaniac. You have to run a business, make money, satisfy stockholders. Instead, in Logan Roy, we have someone who is plainly incompetent and also incontinent (he pees on carpets in the night). The second season began with Roy announcing that the mission of the family was to create the world’s No. 1 media conglomerate. At no point in the following three hours was there any discussion of what this might involve, any inkling that Roy was familiar with the media ecosphere, or its future. He was dimly aware that the future involved something he called 'tech.'....To work, satire needs an underpinning of the recognizable behavior, traits and attitudes of the cohort being satirized. But Succession has never come close to risking a few scenes of business acumen and tradecraft, something that would show the interplay of personalities and skills to make the Roy empire seem credible instead of risible. And the show seems creatively limited by having to stay within the boundaries of its leitmotif of dynastic and generational rivalry. It goes for King Lear and ends up with just the leer." ALSO: Jeremy Strong discusses Kendall Roy's "monstrous pain."