An elderly chief executive officer gets sick, and his children scheme to take over the company. News of his illness sends the stock tumbling while management tries to contain the fallout. A story ripped from the headlines? Perhaps, but it’s also the plot of one of the year’s biggest television hits, a likely streaming favorite as financial professionals kick back on their August vacations.
HBO’s “Succession,” which just concluded its first season, uses real-life examples to spin tales of family bile and byzantine business dealings. The show takes viewers inside the super-rich Roy family, whose patriarch built the fictional multimedia conglomerate, Waystar Royco. Reminiscent of other entertainment behemoths-including Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.-this huge, 20th century conglomerate is falling behind rivals as the media landscape shifts.
The series provides a unique view into a world rarely understood, let alone intelligently explained, by television viewers outside the confines of Wall Street. Logan Roy, played by Brian Cox, is at the helm when he suffers a stroke, forcing his panicky children to scramble in a bid to stabilize the plummeting share price. While Logan is ill, his son Kendall, played by Jeremy Strong, takes over and immediately has to deal with a $3 billion debt crisis triggered by the stock drop.
Sound familiar? The scene is partly based on a real-life crisis faced by Sumner Redstone’s holding company, National Amusements, almost a decade ago, Succession creator Jesse Armstrong says, in an interview. (That company had to sell more than $200 million of non-voting Viacom and CBS shares in order to pay down debt.) Armstrong, who made the HBO series with the help of actor Will Ferrell and The Big Short director Adam McKay (both executive producers), says he consulted a Wall Street Journal reporter to make sure the examples were grounded in real life.