In season two, episode four of HBO’s Succession, two members of the show’s ensemble, Tom Wamsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) and Greg Hirsch (Nicholas Braun), are confined to a designated ‘safe room’ that looks to be a repurposed supply closet. They are in the headquarters of ATN News (a conservative network targeting the fearful elderly, their universe’s equivalent of Fox), an organisation of which the ambitious and cowardly Tom has recently been placed in charge, appointed by his father-in-law, Logan Roy (Brian Cox), the CEO of the multi-billion dollar media conglomerate Waystar-Royco. The building has been locked down; a gun was fired and there is wild speculation that the culprit is antifa, although it is later revealed to have been an employee committing suicide.

Over the course of the series, the lanky and simpering Greg falls upwards in the manner only available to apparently harmless fools. A cousin to Logan’s four children, he is peripheral to the show’s primary narrative engine: the troubled negotiation between these siblings and other power-players to determine who might lead the company once the elderly, sometimes ailing, sometimes formidable patriarch steps aside. But Greg—relatively unmoneyed, naïve to the machinations of the family-run megacorporation, driven by flashes of curiosity, greed and entitlement for a lifestyle he can’t quite picture—constitutes the show’s emotional core; he is its chorus, its witness. His presence facilitates the audience’s understanding of this rarified realm of power and egoism, but also exposes its cruel absurdity as, through accident and good-fortune, Greg finds himself entangled in it, suffering by it, taking advantage of it. His lack of skills and experience tend to help rather than hinder his advancement, and we are thus shown how the logic of the corporation, of money at its most immense scale, is almost entirely abstracted from the material world, unmoored from the fantasy that a person might find themselves in a powerful position because they know what they’re doing.