The best moments on television shine for lots of different reasons. They can be heartwarming, tearjerking, shocking – or, sometimes, so viscerally uncomfortable that they keep replaying in your head long after the episode or even the series is over.
“What It Takes”, the sixth episode of the third series of the HBO drama Succession, ends with just such a moment. Logan Roy, ruthless patriarch of both his family and their media empire, has chosen to support a repugnant, near-fascist presidential nominee and is demanding that his children line up for a photograph with this man. His daughter, who has already aired her opposition to the choice and been ignored, is hovering on the sidelines of the photoshoot refusing to get into frame. This is when Logan (played by a magisterial Brian Cox) walks over to her and in a menacing undertone delivers the killer line. “Siobhan, are you part of this family or not?” For a second, the choice to answer “No” flickers across her face. Then she knuckles under, lines up and pastes on a smile for the camera. It’s a brutal and brief encapsulation of the show’s fundamental tension: the three-way fight between morality, loyalty and self-interest. In Succession, the family always wins even as its members lose.
The family saga, of which Succession is merely the most recent and prominent example, has long been a fundamental component of what is generally known as “prestige TV” – the big budget, often American series that have captured the cultural zeitgeist over the past three decades. At the same time stuck-at-home viewers were indulging in the second and third series of Succession, they were also delving back into the boxsets that they had never had time for before. And many of those are also family sagas of one sort of another, from The Sopranos to Game of Thrones, which in amongst the dragons and the nudity is an epic tale of dynastic alliances and betrayals.
So why are we so hooked on these intergenerational tales of conflict and inheritance? It’s partly because a family saga comes with a built-in narrative arc: power and influence must ultimately, no matter how hard ageing members resist, pass down the family tree, because time can only move forward, never back. Then there’s the fascination of tracking how different traits and habits are replicated. Logan Roy and his eldest son Kendall are almost never on the same side of any fight, but looking in on their relationship from the outside, the viewer can see that their conflicts are more often because of their similarities than their differences. As subject matter, these tangled fictional genealogies are universally relatable. There might not be any vast media conglomerates or iron thrones to inherit, but we all have families and all families have their tensions. The gravitational pull of the family unit is inescapable: even those who cut all ties still end up defining themselves in opposition to it.
Millennia before the current boom in high-quality television, writers were exploring the potential of this kind of storytelling. The Old Testament is one early example: the so-called “succession narrative” in the second book of Samuel and the first Book of Kings deals with the family history of the royal house of ancient Israel and the battle to accede to the throne of David. The Ancient Greek dramatists were similarly fascinated by the theatrical potential of lineage and inheritance. Sophocles’ most famous and enduring plays, Oedipus Rex and Antigone, both feature protagonists torn between the competing attractions of duty, desire and independence.
Austen, Dickens and Galsworthy
This obsessive documentation of family conflict was itself inherited by later writers of the western canon. What are the novels of Jane Austen, with their preoccupation with familial relationships and marriage, if not family sagas? Twentieth-century critics frequently chose Bleak House as the greatest of Charles Dickens’s novels. It seems no coincidence that it is his most overtly family-orientated story. By placing a seemingly never-ending Court of Chancery case at the heart of the narrative, Dickens exposed the dark and seedy side of our preoccupation with inheritance. Greed and family do not make for a happy mixture.
Following in Dickens’s footsteps in the early 20th century came John Galsworthy. Beginning in 1906, he published a trio of connected novels known collectively as The Forsyte Saga. Dealing with the lives and property of the titular Forsyte family, these books delicately skewered the upper-middle-class Edwardian snobbishness that had replaced the Victorian priggishness of the previous century. Although Galsworthy was best known for his plays during his own lifetime, it is this trilogy that has survived in popular culture. Unlikely as it may seem, these novels provided an early indication – right from the beginning of the 20th century – of how well a family saga could work on television. A black and white BBC adaptation of The Forsyte Saga in the 1960s was such a roaring success that 18 million people tuned in to watch the final episode, and it made history as the first BBC series to be sold for official broadcast in the Soviet Union.
What all of these family sagas have in common, from the Book of Kings to Succession, is the wealth and power of the family in question. When inheritance is a major theme, it follows that there must be something to inherit, and as a result the overwhelming majority of such stories deal with characters who are rich, privileged and sometimes even royal. There are, of course, deviations. Yaa Gyasi’s 2016 novel Homegoing is a family saga that covers the generational fallout from the transatlantic slave trade. Similarly, a recent National Theatre adaptation of several D. H. Lawrence novels, Husbands and Sons, looked at family dynamics and notions of inheritance in a working-class mining community. But these are the exceptions. Even our tastes in non-fictional family sagas tend towards the wealthy and famous, as seen in the way that tabloids delight in the exploits of celebrity offspring or extended family groups.
Part of what makes Succession worth watching is that same frisson of reality versus fiction. It’s impossible not to notice the parallels between Logan Roy, his media companies and his three warring children and Rupert Murdoch, his media companies and his four children from his first two marriages, all of whom have at one time or another held senior positions in his businesses.
Dysfunctionality on the small screen
The entertainment industry in general and television in particular are very good at latching on to a successful format and replicating it, as different studios and broadcasters attempt to lure viewers’ attention in an oversaturated market. Thus the popularity of Succession is spawning a renaissance of sorts for the family saga on the small screen. The Righteous Gemstones follows the fortunes of a dysfunctional family of televangelists, and was instantly renewed for a third season. Its tagline – “serving the lord and themselves” – could almost be a motto for this whole subgenre. Then there’s Monarch, a multigenerational drama starring Anna Friel and Susan Sarandon, about a country music dynasty called, appropriately enough, the Romans, which promises Roy-style conflict with a different industry as its backdrop.
On this side of the Atlantic, this year ITV will air the first series of Riches, which creator Abby Ajayi describes as “a love letter to Black London”. The six-part series is already attracting comparisons to Succession for its focus on a family of Black Londoners squabbling over their wealthy father’s business empire after his health begins to fail. And, of course, the world of TV family sagas is not immune to the industry’s obsession with reboots, because this is also the year that HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel, House of the Dragon, will debut. In 2022, television is still very much keeping it in the family.
This piece is from the New Humanist spring 2022 edition. Subscribe today.
