Why HBO’s award winning Succession is this year’s must-see TV series

A comedy that gets less funny as it goes along? Mmm, tell me more. One that takes us inside a wealthy media dynasty flouting every moral and judicial law to consolidate power? OK. Here’s the best bit – there are no likeable characters! Sounds about as much fun as eczema. So why do I, like so many others, currently love Succession more than any other show on TV?

The Trump name swirls around this world too, like flies on faeces. Stories of Donald refusing to pay his contractors are legion, just like the story line in the show that resulted in a revenge raccoon being shoved up Logan Roy’s chimney (none of which is a euphemism). Though of course the character of Connor Roy – the moronic, incompetent, hooker-dependent son who thinks he can be president – is wholly rooted in fiction.

Moreover, it is fun. Unreasonably so. Succession has a kind of spontaneous, semi improvised anarchy. Actors are given multiple takes to horse around, with writers lobbing in alternate comic lines. Jesse Armstrong’s opus is tightly written, though – at points almost a screwball comedy. “Screw-you-and-a-kick-in-the-b****s” comedy would be more on the money, in fact. The command of language is absolute, most often in the service of childish insults.

We’ve seen this before in The Thick Of It – one of Armstrong’s previous shows – but it is stranger, more deeply rooted in character here. A recent episode featured “horse potatoes!” a cutting interjection from old-world matriarch Nan Pierce; later the insult “mole woman” becomes somehow flirtatious in the mouth of Roman Roy, Kieran Culkin’s compulsively rude, stupid/intuitive imp.

His superb character portrait is one of many in the show. Kendall, tied to his father by tragedy and blackmail in the first season finale, has become a lugubrious enforcer. He strides around acquiring then firing start-ups like Darth Vader in pinstripes.