An empty suit possessed by ten demons

Characters in a tragedy don't know the title of the play, which is why they don't know whose tragedy it is until it's over. Gertrude, poisoned while her son is still alive, realizes in her last moments that this isn't The Tragedy of Gertrude, Queen of Denmark. Succession – which I finally watched this month, after everyone else was sick of talking about it, which is my tragedy – doesn't have a real title. It has a blank space for a name to be filled in. All of its characters spend the series trying to become the main character, but in the end, we remember what happens to the main characters of tragedies. The people on the screen seem to realize this too. They begin to shrink away from the lead role, sometimes actively and sometimes through self-destruction, until suddenly the show is no longer an ensemble cast at all, and it's The Tragedy of Kendall, Briefly Co-CEO of Waystar Royco. The most tragical of a series of tragical little men gets to be the hero, which in terms of the classical unities means he's the patsy, the fall guy, the one who blows it and loses everything. Only suckers want that part.

I was a Succession resister for a long time, and I apologize to those of you who still are. I have bad news: it really is as good as everyone says, a sparkling tragicomedy exactly the length of a work week. These days, they make highbrow 8- or 10- or 40-hour films chopped like cocaine into television episodes, and while a lot of these shows are secretly kind of bad, sometimes one of them becomes so overpraised that it becomes secretly brilliant. So it is with Succession, the one about a legally distinct analogue of the Murdoch family. In the media, there's a weird trope of describing things as "fan fiction" that are by no means fan fiction; the term gets used for any conspiracy theory or weird idea about a celebrity, anything people make up in order to believe. In reality, of course, fan writing is a creative form and doesn't involve any belief in the literal truth of what you're saying. In this sense, Succession is something like a fan work, except that it's a paid gig with a budget, and the characters are made up in a way that fanfic characters aren't (although in most fanfic I've read, the characters are still more or less made up, fanfic being interpretive and not imitative labor).

Most importantly, a fan work implies fandom, and Succession is clear-eyed about the consistent awfulness of its characters. It portrays them with compassion, but, you know, it's still Hamlet where everyone's Claudius. Fine actors can make us understand Claudius, even love him at times, but you don't forget that he's a killer. There's a remarkable scene late in the show where Waystar executive Tom Wambsgans, played by Matthew Macfayden as an empty suit possessed by ten demons, has to testify before Congress. He gets asked about some bits of interpersonal cruelty from an earlier season, things we found funny and stressful and also indicative of Tom's high-pressure closetedness, which the show just trusts us to notice – but also things that were played as comedy-normal, the kinds of things that happen on British sitcoms (Succession was showrun by a Britcom guy, which it never lets us forget). When Tom is made to describe his acts in front of an audience, though, we're reminded that all around the characters is a world of genuinely normal people, who are not in a sitcom, and who find Tom pathetic and strange.

If you know the scene Tom's talking about, you also know how kinky it is. Succession isn't interested in kink-shaming its characters, a lot of whom are sexually outré by conventional standards, but it is interested in the ways they drag each other into their favorite scenarios without consent, often without admitting that they're doing something fucky. When it shames its characters, it shames them for not knowing themselves, for being disinterested – disinterested in reciprocity, in others' desires, even in their own pleasure.  None of these people ever seems to be seeking happiness. And they live in a world where business is so often described with violent and sexual metaphors that the lines between the three have become invisible. Sometimes this leads to a complicated place, or occasionally a good one, if two people's stumbling, thrusting desires end up aligning. Mostly, it doesn't.

Succession knows that, where the very rich are involved, there's not a lot of room for negotiation or consent. And it knows the difference between showing us characters who ignore consent and ignoring our consent as an audience. This is a delicate trick, and it has to do with framing. When terrible things happen, they tend to be witnessed. Someone sees the death; they see the violence; they see the cruelty, and we stay with the person seeing, and the focus of the scene is on them. We aren't told how to react – this is often done by showing many people seeing, with different reactions, or else by having the witness be a character who dissociates – but our reactions are mediated. We are watching them watch. They feel the helplessness, or the anger, or the relief that it isn't them, and we learn about them that way.

At the center of Succession, of course, is a family, and if I haven't devoted much time to the Roy siblings here, it's because other writers have already done it. People have already written very well about the siblings' responses to abuse, their styles of manipulation, their sexual and romantic lives, their immense traumas, and the different ways that they enable their country's onscreen slide into fascism while trying very hard to see themselves as good people (except for Roman, who is determined to see himself as a villain – this show really is about what would happen if Hamlet, Lady Macbeth, and Richard III were immature and spiritually greasy and utterly lacking in grandeur, in-universe or out of it; if there's a Shakespeare play they parallel, it's Antony and Cleopatra, in which the heroes half-ass and botch everything they try to do).

But I do want to talk about that main character thing again. Succession's characters all sort of know they're characters. They cast themselves in various ways, and they present themselves as certain people. By and large, they're looking for an identity that eludes them, especially the siblings, who have all been raised from birth solely to fear and obey their monstrous father. Some people outside the family do have a stronger sense of identity. Frank, Waystar's chairman, is happy in the role of trusted consigliere and amoral center. Gerri, its corporate counsel and the series' only genuinely brilliant mind, does want more, but is limited by the company's misogyny, so she's cast herself as the charismatic sidekick who gets all the best lines, and has made a decades-long career out of that. As I've said, the actual siblings are all auditioning for the role of the hero, and all of them have complex feelings about Frank and Gerri, who represent two viable ways of being which need to be forcefully rejected, lest the siblings suddenly recognize that what they're doing is pointless.

No one's feelings about these outsiders are more complex than Roman's, because unlike his fumbling and desperate brother Kendall, or his conniving and cynical sister Shiv, Roman knows he's a clown, and he regards Frank and Gerri as a "bad" and a "good" option for how he might style his greasepaint. His growing recognition of all this is part of the reason that this dangerous, absurd man survives the series with some dignity intact. Shiv, conversely, makes a point of noticing neither of the older people; she especially can't acknowledge Gerri, because Gerri is exactly the woman she's trying to be (a sophisticated strategist, a formidable enemy, a delight at parties, a born domme – they even lightly resemble each other). To see Gerri would be to accept that you can be a goddess without being born a god. Shiv's inability to do that is part of the reason her ending is so difficult; she doesn't see a future for herself because she rejects the futures that are all around her.

But where Roman steps aside out of newfound self-awareness, and Shiv out of despair, Kendall – who was raised to be his father's successor, and who has nothing else to hope or fear – doesn't have the sense to run. The series' ending is really about the irrelevance of all three siblings to the actual fate of the corporation, but it's Kendall who hurls himself at the CEO's chair and misses. It's not even because he wants it. He wants a lot of things – to appear good and decent, to be respected by his family, to manage his mental illness and addiction – and he loses all of them in the pursuit of a power he chases because it's obligatory, because it's the done thing, because his father told him to do it. And that's tragedy, not just the flaw and the fall, not just taking your whole country with you, but the attempt to be someone you're not. Succession understands that tragedy is about flop sweat. It's about the failure to hold a pose.