For Fans of Succession

King Lear is the obvious comparison: an ageing patriarch, three children, a kingdom to divide, catastrophic choices all round. But Succession earns the comparison rather than borrowing prestige from it. The show understands that Shakespearean tragedy works because everyone is partially right and entirely wrong at the same time. Logan is a monster who also made something real. Kendall is broken by his father in ways that make him capable of cruelty himself. The humour never undercuts the grief; it deepens it. Brian Cox's performance is the connective tissue between these works.

Succession is frequently hilarious. 'Boar on the floor' and the cruise-ship episodes are comedy writing at a level most pure comedies never reach. But the jokes never let you relax into them. The cruelty underneath the wit is always visible. This is closer to the tradition of Evelyn Waugh or early Martin Amis than to conventional prestige TV drama: a satirical mode where laughing is the correct response and also makes you feel slightly implicated. The show trusts you to hold both registers simultaneously.

Crusader Kings III should be required playing for anyone who watched Succession and thought 'yes, but could I do better?' The game is a dynasty simulator where your children inherit your titles and your character flaws, where marriages are mergers, where every alliance is a liability waiting to surface. The player discovers, as the Roys do, that securing the succession is structurally impossible: the act of designating an heir creates the next round of rivalry. It is also, like Succession, unexpectedly funny about human nature.

The Roy family was clearly shaped by the Murdochs, the Redstones, and the Hearsts: real dynasties where the founder's need for control outlasted any practical wisdom about succession. Michael Wolff's reporting on Rupert Murdoch and Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses (The Power Broker) are the non-fiction complements here. Both cover men who built institutions that were expressions of ego, and both ask the same question Succession asks: what happens to the institution when the ego is gone?