‘Succession’ Returns, With No Real People Involved
The New York Times
In the new season of the dynastic HBO drama, the very rich are even less like you and me than they used to be.
Deep into Season 3 of HBO’s “Succession,” Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong), the scion-gone-rogue of a family of media billionaires, tells his brother Roman (Kieran Culkin), “You’re not a real person.”
It’s a significant insult on this show, on which the question of who does and doesn’t qualify as “real” comes up repeatedly. Most shockingly, it arises in the corporate designation for incidents of sexual abuse and violence against workers on the cruise lines owned by the family business, Waystar Royco: “N.R.P.I.,” or No Real Person Involved.
This chilling language gets to a core theme of “Succession”: that today’s very rich have become more different from you and me than F. Scott Fitzgerald could have dreamed. The Roys, and the handful of hyper-rich that they move among, are not simply a breed apart from us. They have become another species.
