Succession, White Lotus, and the Rise of Cynical TV
A certain part of America loves to hate the rich, even though secretly it wants nothing more than to be rich and is green with envy of the rich. I imagine that part of America is liberal, coastal, and upper middle class - well-off, but only just getting by because it spends most of its income on outrageously expensive real estate, overpriced vacations, and pampering its offspring.
This swath of America often lives in the same or adjacent neighborhoods to the truly rich and that’s why the envy is palpable, because it’s so close to home. (In the immortal words of the philosopher Alain de Botton, “You don’t envy the Queen of England, even though she’s much richer than you and she lives in a nice house, because she’s a little weird,” meaning, far removed.) It is safe to say that I’ve just described the bulk of the viewers of TV shows like Succession and White Lotus, the two wildly popular HBO shows about the rich behaving badly.
A quick recap for those of you who have been living under the rock for the past four years. Succession follows the story of a vicious TV mogul Logan Roy (based on Rupert Murdoch) and his irreparably damaged, entitled, sniveling kidalt children who are vying for his kingdom in the expectation of him croaking. Think King Lear but without Cordelia. White Lotus is a tale of out-of-touch richness mixed with vacation porn. Both portray the wealthy as dangerous though pathetic narcissists whose outsize sense of entitlement overshadows everything else and whose generally nasty behavior is not only condoned but catered to because protected by money.
The other overarching theme of both shows is cynicism, that is the belief that self-interest is the fundamental and prevailing impetus of life. The rich use each other left and right, keep a rabid eye on their wealth, paranoid that everyone else is after it, engage in relationships that are purely transactional, buy friendships, lovers, sex, companionship, and treat the underlings like dirt. The only thing they know is money, the only power they know is money, and the only benefit is known is money. In this world genuine human emotions are absent, as well as even remotely sympathetic characters.
There is something new to this - usually, a show has at least some sympathetic main characters. In these two shows there are none - and, the showrunners seem to tell us, if you develop sympathy for any of them, you are a sucker. The reign of cynicism is unadulterated. It lets us be completely detached from the characters themselves, which kind of goes against the historically main premise of entertainment, which is supposed to hook us via sympathy even for characters like Walter White in Breaking Bad or Don Draper in Mad Men.
Instead, what these shows hook the viewer with is schadenfreude and wealth porn. The first - seeing the rich being nasty to each other - plays into the aforementioned hatred, and the second one engenders envy that adds to the feedback loop of hate. This goes for everything from a completely wasteful $525 Loro Piana hat that Kendall Roy sports, to private helicopters and planes, to the five star hotels you will never afford.
The problem with such viewing is that it’s cold comfort and more entertainment-as-anesthesia, which makes the audience have all the wrong takeaways. Seeing rich people being shitty to each other is a consolation prize for our own lives. What we are not seeing is a broken American capitalist system that has enriched the few and endangered the many and that is in a dire need of change.
As one t-shirt says, Adorno was right. In his book, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, he criticized the culture industry (a term he coined) that has no choice than to operate by the logic of capitalism, even when it makes artifacts that are supposedly critical of the system itself and are infused with the spirit of rebellion (he would have had a field day with The Matrix). This is what separates it from art (or used to, since art is now an industry as well). Viewed in this light, both Succession and White Lotus are what they are - products of the entertainment industry devised to relieve us of our money and time. Of course, like you, I look forward to the next episode.