Plutocrats in party mode

Which is the scariest episode of Succession? If you've watched the HBO sensation—created by British satirist Jesse Armstrong and streaming in India on JioHotstar—you're bound to have a few nominees.

- RAJA SEN

Which is the scariest episode of Succession? If you've watched the HBO sensation—created by British satirist Jesse Armstrong and streaming in India on JioHotstar—you're bound to have a few nominees. It may be the one where a media baron forces his employees to humiliate themselves with a game called "Boar on the Floor," the one where a wife spells out to her husband just how surely she doesn't love him, the one where a son desperately wants to confess a crime to his mother, to which she tells him they'll do it over eggs in the morning—only to ghost him come breakfast. Armstrong created awful (and awfully compelling) characters, and they've left scars.

For me, the most chilling episode remains Whatever It Takes (season 3, episode 6) where a media magnate and his family are encamped in a Republican retreat and, in hotel rooms and bathrooms, casually vet and select America's next President. At a time when oligarchs appear to be running countries with more certainty than elected leaders, this episode cuts deep, focusing on personal pettiness and whimsy and the impossible imbalance of power. It felt frighteningly plausible.

Armstrong riffs again on men who control the world—who control all our worlds, to be precise—in his debut film