This series has been on my radar for a while due to it supposedly being about the succession of a company and the fact that it’s loosely based on the Murdoch family. As usual, I like to wait until the whole series is complete and so here we are. The bad news is that this is not really about business as all as it tends to gloss over the day-to-day of corporate life. Instead it’s all about the family drama. The good news is that it’s very good at it and all of the characters are villains that you’ll love to hate. I do worry that the pattern will become too repetitive but for now I enjoy it and will be down for the second season.

It’s the 80th birthday of the patriarch of the Roy family, Logan Roy, founder and CEO of the global media conglomerate Waystar Royco. As his four children gather to celebrate, he uses the occasion to get them to sign a change in the terms of the family trust giving his voting rights to his current wife Marcia in the event of his incapacitation. Kendall, the only one of them working in the company, signs without hesitation. The eldest son, a recluse named Conner, says that he will do whatever the others decide. The daughter Shiv is a political consultant and says she needs to consult her lawyer. The youngest son, the wastrel Romain, seems agreeable in exchange for a senior role at the company. Logan insists that they reenact their usual custom of playing baseball together. They are joined by Shiv’s fiancé, Tom, a brown noser who works in the company’s Parks and Resorts division and Greg, an impoverished cousin who wants to get close to the main family. Kendall wants his father to name him as his successor but is berated by Logan for being careless in looking over the new agreement. As they travel back to the city, Logan has a stroke, putting the future of the company in doubt.

It’s a hell of a first episode and you get a powerful sense of just how thoughtlessly rich this family is when they take multiple helicopters just to get to a baseball field. But it’s their casual callousness that bites. When a humiliated Kendall leaves early, Romain recruits a random Latino child to play in their baseball game, offering a million dollars if she can achieve a home run. When she fails, Romain tears up the check in front of her eyes, saying that he has to be fair. There isn’t a single morally upstanding character in the regular cast. Even Greg who fails out of a job at one of the company’s resorts as a costume-wearing mascot sucks up to anyone higher than him in the hierachy and shamelessly offers to do their bidding. Everyone has an agenda and everyone is eminently hateable. Most of the fun lies in watching their over-the-top antics as they spar against one another, exactly why this is considered a satirical black comedy rather than soap opera.

I am annoyed that this unserious approach offers a very warped view of corporate life. It’s all too plausible that nepotism explains why family members shoot straight to the top of the corporate ladder. It is less believable that they are totally incompetent at their jobs as a result, nor that their work consists only of either mucking around or buying other companies. Longer-term, I’m also unsure about how much they can mine this premise for family drama. Even in this one season, you can tell that every episode is centered around some event, a birthday, a party, a board meeting, that provides a rationale for the family to gather together. It’s fascinating the first few times but once you see the familiar pattern you can’t unsee it and it makes the show feel like it has a very rigid structure. I hope that the show opens up later so that the core cast can interact with a wider array of supporting characters or else I can’t see how this can keep my interest. Having more ordinary people react to the antics of the family would be funny too.

For now I’m onboard with the next season not least because the finale of this one ends with a real banger. A great indicator of how interesting a show is is how much you talk about it afterwards. My wife and I couldn’t stop discussing details of each scene like how much of a wuss Romain was or laugh at the ridiculousness of Conner espousing his environmentalism. So it’s definitely a fun and entertaining show even though I was disappointed about it not actually being a realistic one about business.