There’s a dialogue snippet featured in the trailer for the new season of Mike White’s HBO series The White Lotus that cracks me up.
“What if this life is just a test, to see if we can become better people?” suggests teenager Lochlan Ratliff (Sam Nivola). “No. What?” responds baffled, vapid older brother Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), vehemently rejecting the idea before it can gain purchase.
As the kernel of a show about the wealthy behaving terribly goes, this is god-tier stuff. It captures a virulent strain of elite solipsism in just two words and one comically aghast face.
Still, it’s another rich-people-being-dreadful HBO drama that’s been on my mind over the last few days
The timing feels apposite, too. Becoming better people? In some narratives, the effort is not just out of fashion, it is regarded as naive. The particular appeal of Donald Trump, it is claimed, is that he gives his most fervent supporters permission to be their worst selves. It’s a “you too can be amoral and narcissistic” sort of pitch, even if not everyone has the inherited cash to carry it off.
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Still, it’s another rich-people-being-dreadful HBO drama that’s been on my mind over the last few days. Succession might have aired its final episode in May 2023, but that’s a mere technicality. The saga’s now screenwriter-less plot continues to unfold day after day in column inches of unlikely poignancy.
This brittle real-life afterlife surfaces in 3,000 pages of court documents related to last year’s Nevada probate hearing at which Rupert Murdoch (93) sought to make a bombshell amendment to the family trust and hand sole control of his media interests after his death to the right-wing Lachlan, the older of his two sons by 15 months, and the only one he believes will maintain the dubious legacy of assets such as Fox News.
For fans of life imitating art that imitates life, the New York Times reported in December that Liz’s lawyer Mark Devereux had been inspired by the Succession episode in which patriarch Logan Roy abruptly dies to write what became known as the ‘Succession memo’
The grenade-like plan was dubbed “Project Family Harmony”. But Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch lost the case, with the judge comprehensively siding with the “objecting children” – estranged younger son James Murdoch, his sister Elisabeth Murdoch (Liz) and their half-sister Prudence MacLeod (Prue). They retain the power to outvote Lachlan after their father’s death.
Most astonishingly, for fans of life imitating art that imitates life, the New York Times reported in December that Liz’s lawyer Mark Devereux had been inspired by the Succession episode in which patriarch Logan Roy abruptly dies to write what became known as the “Succession memo”. His aim was to persuade Liz and her siblings to think about how they might try to avoid the corporate chaos and public-relations panic depicted on the show.
The memo-triggering episode, which made headlines and won Emmys, amped up the discombobulation of grief. Without any foreshadowing, Logan departs the stage off-screen on a private jet. Chest compressions continue, but neither viewers nor his children, stuck on a boat, can see what’s going on.
Via speakerphone, they swing between denial and the desire for a straight answer. The refusal of the ultra-rich to accept that there are some things in life they can’t control permeates their reaction. Told her father has likely gone, daughter Shiv Roy says, “No, I can’t have that.”
The humanity of this is striking. Of course, she was upset by it. Succession may ultimately have been a work of fiction, but there was little disguising the fact that it had been inspired by years of rivalry, mistrust and paranoia within the Murdoch family
One new detail in last week’s NYT story on the Murdochs by Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg leapt out to me: when Devereux called Liz to discuss Succession’s dispatching of Logan Roy, she “had already watched the episode twice and been extremely upset by it”.
The humanity of this is striking. Of course, she was upset by it. Succession may ultimately have been a work of fiction, but there was little disguising the fact that it had been inspired by years of rivalry, mistrust and paranoia within the Murdoch family. By killing off the tone-setting Logan, the show was offering a glimpse of a fraught future – a power vacuum of mixed emotion that Elisabeth Murdoch watched twice.
But for the sheer volume of pathos, another piece published in recent days takes the prize: an in-depth, incendiary interview given by James Murdoch (52) and his wife Kathryn Hufschmid to the Atlantic.
Unlike his sister, former 21st century Fox chief executive James Murdoch doesn’t appear to have been an avid Succession watcher. “He’d tried the first episode, but found it too painful,” writes journalist McKay Coppins. Perhaps someone has, nevertheless, unhelpfully shared with him one of Logan Roy’s last verdicts on his children: “I love you, but you are not serious people.” The line lives on, after all, on T-shirts.
In any event, James – characterised as “the troublesome beneficiary” by his father’s and brother’s lawyers for crimes such as being worried about Nazis and climate change – got to hear some similar sentiments when he was deposed as part of the probate case.
“Have you ever done anything successful on your own?” was one question from Rupert’s lawyer. “Does it strike you that, in your account, everything that goes wrong is always somebody else’s fault?” was another.
In James’s telling, it was only Rupert’s pro-Trump pivot, made after it became clear early in his first term that he was good for business, that revealed to him how much his father had been guided by power and profit, not ideology, all along
He reports realising that his father, typing intermittently on his phone throughout the deposition, was texting the lawyer the questions to ask: “How f**king twisted is that?”
In James’s telling, it was only Rupert’s pro-Trump pivot, made after it became clear early in his first term that he was good for business, that revealed to him how much his father had been guided by power and profit, not ideology, all along. This is both remarkable naivety and the understandable delusion of someone who grew up as the son of a mogul.
His tragedy, shared with Liz and Prue, is that he failed to become an entirely thoughtless “no, what?” kind of person – he has not skipped through life unburdened by moral concern. This put him on a collision course with his own father, a man intent on influencing vast swathes of the media even after his death.
“F**king twisted” is one way of putting it. A desperately sad form of favouritism, one with material consequences for the world we now live in, is another.
