This kind of experience is pretty common, and I nearly bailed a couple times during season 1 for the exact same reason. I stuck with it for the quality of the show, and because friends encouraged me to grind it out, and it paid off highly. I’ve seen the series twice all the way through now, and will revisit it.
You’ll never grow to admire or like many (if any) of the characters, but you do start to understand and sympathize with them, and especially pity them as people who have everything and nothing at the same time. Once you get used to their low bar as human beings, you click into the rhythm and psychology of it. Far more compelling than at first look; and highest quality writing, acting, stylization throughout.
Actually, you do like cousin Greg, who is the Jesse (
Breaking Bad) of the show, and represents us--is a kind of stand-in for us--if we were cast into this Ninth Circle of Hell of Billionaires. Greg, like Jesse is trying to function in a mad world with mad rules, and brutality, and is awkward an funny, with bits of a good person that keeps hanging in there. But this show is on a
far higher level than BB or most anything. What great art can do at its finest is to show us something we could never see otherwise, and that is truthful about the human race. With
Succession we get an up close look at billionaires who feel they justly (and to far too many extents in fact) rule the world, and all the rest of us are ants under their feet. The show is closely based on the horrendous Murdoch family, but also the Astors, Redstones and Mercers.
I never understand people rejecting a narrative work because of unlikeable characters. I am very different from those people, I suppose.
Succession is the
finest writing I have ever encountered, in TV certainly, and inclusive of film, perhaps, but that kind of comparison is almost unworkable.
You do
not have to have a uniformly good or sympathetic or good guy character in a great narrative work of art. In fact great masterpieces often don't, like Shakespeare's
Richard III, David Chase's
The Sopranos, or Kubrick's
A Clockwork Orange. In those examples the whole point is they are monstrous and yet the telling of the tales winds its way into our brains and we end up rooting for them (in an incredibly queasy but very real way) because they are set in a world that is even worse. Alex in
Clockwork is in a world where the state wants to control and damage his very ability to enjoy anything he loves. Tony is trapped in The Life (mob), caught between family and The Family, and suffers from mental illness.
The greatest of all characters capture the tragedy of real human beings both good and evil, and keep us off balance with that until we finally do identify with them and recognize a dark potential in ourselves. The very opening episode of
The Sopranos has Tony in an amazingly tender scene with his young daughter in a church (the one character he truly loves without limits, and his meaning in life, and also all those years later, her image walking in a door, joining the family group is the absolutely final thing he will see). And seconds later in that opening episode, we see Tony
enjoying strangling a man to death with a wire. These two protagonists, as one, will always be--both of them--the real Tony. When a work of narrative art gets you to care about a character like Richard III, Alex, and Tony,it's doing some monumentally great, and the melodrama of presenting just an easily identifiable "character you care about," has no value in comparison.
The great thing about
Succession (well, at near the top of a dozen truly great things), is not just that we do care about several horrific people, but also that it constantly
flips the audience's sympathies all over the place, often even momentarily. Often so, so briefly, we are off balance with who is "less horrible enough to root for" within a scene. We keep searching for one member of the family or another as our stand-in for the moment. Shiv seems to be the grandly, most often worst to me, but as intended, Your Mileage May Vary with the magic these writers are consistently delivering. Greg is a classic case of a constant trick character. Seems good guy caught in the hurricane of billionaire sociopathy all around him, seems like a permanent teenage awkward dolt, and then suddenly does something super smart (this happened with Jesse too).
