Succession and TV's super-rich: Have we stopped ogling them?

HBO's hit drama has been among the shows showing the ugly side of wealth this year. Could the small-screen's love affair with the 1% be coming to an end, asks Anna Bogutskaya.

Earlier this month, the latest series of Succession, the hit HBO drama about warring media family the Roys, concluded with an explosive finale set at the Tuscan wedding of Lady Caroline Collingwood, ex-wife of patriarch Logan Roy and mother to three of the Roy children. But one scene above all was truly gut-wrenching – when Kendall, Logan's troubled middle son, collapsed to the ground and had an emotional breakdown while flanked by his siblings Shiv and Roman. This happened not in the beautiful villa where the wedding took place or its gardens, but instead in a dusty alley around the back, right by the bins. As the episode's director Mark Mylod explained to Vulture, this location was deliberately chosen for this crux moment because of its bleakness: "It was that dustiness, and it was 100 yards away from the beautiful green glamour of the wedding, but it felt like a different world. We could put that new, harsh light down on the characters, and they've got nowhere to hide," he said.

More like this:

–      The best TV shows of 2021

–      The Sex and City reunion is 'awkward'

–      Has Squid Game changed TV forever?

Amongst the Tuscan views elsewhere in the episode, it was the bins that stuck out. This unseemly detail pointedly encapsulated what Succession, and other watercooler shows of 2021, have been trying to do: strip away the aspirational quality we tend to associate with wealth.

Alongside Succession, The White Lotus and Nine Perfect Strangers – both dramas set at luxury resorts – have also centred the lives of highly privileged but unglamorous characters. And then there are the shows concerned with the other side of the economic divide, and the exploitation of the poor by the rich: the Netflix phenomenon Squid Game, with its tale of debt-ridden South Koreans cajoled into bloodsports by mysterious, super-rich "VIPs", and Maid, another autumn hit on the streaming platform, which told the story, inspired by author Stephanie Land's memoir, of Alex, a young woman living on the brink of homelessness while cleaning fancy houses. This focus on the rich-poor divide on screen goes hand in hand with harsh realities; in the UK, government data has shown the gap between the richest in society and the rest of the population has widened over the past 10 years, with another recent piece of research calculating that the the richest 1% own almost a quarter of the nation's wealth. Meanwhile in the US, 2019 figures showed the wealthiest 10% own 70% of the nation's riches, while in February, a study found that the wealth of America's billionaires (around 650 in total) had increased by $1.3tn during the pandemic.

Many of the most-talked about shows of 2021 have scrutinised the 1% and pitted them against the 99%. As Vulture's TV Critic Roxana Hadadi points out, "most people watching these shows are part of the 99%" – so why have these shows captured the cultural imagination so strongly? "Succession does a very good job in making wealth seem not covetable," continues Hadadi, "White Lotus became a cultural conversation because most of us could see ourselves in the resort staff, and people latched on to Squid Game because everyone's backstories are very relatable. Who of us has not been in the kind of debt that you think you will carry your entire life">window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'alternating-thumbnails-a', container: 'taboola-below-article', placement: 'Below Article', target_type: 'mix' });