Is “Succession” the Best Sitcom on Television?

When the third season of “Succession” premièred, a couple of weeks ago, some viewers watching on HBO Max experienced a glitch: instead of being brought to the first episode of the new season, they found themselves rewatching the first episode of the entire series. The pilot opens with Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong) rapping in a town car belonging to Waystar Royco, the right-wing media conglomerate run by his father, Logan (Brian Cox). It is Logan’s eightieth birthday, and Kendall is certain that his father is going to name him C.E.O. of the company. (“You’re the man, Mr. Roy!” Kendall’s driver tells him.) The scene is a far cry from the actual opening of Season 3, which begins where Season 2 left off, with Kendall collecting himself after a press conference in which he has effectively declared war against his father. And yet Kendall was able to get through several bars of the Beastie Boys’ “An Open Letter to NYC” before viewers realized the mistake.

The confusion was understandable. Despite all its minute twists and turns, “Succession” is surprisingly static. The series, a brilliant tragedy-satire of the corporate élite, created by the British comedy writer Jesse Armstrong, is centered on the question of who will succeed Logan, a fearsome Rupert Murdoch-like mogul who closes roughly seventy per cent of his interactions with the epithet “Fuck off!” Although Kendall is initially presented as the heir apparent, it soon becomes clear that he is not cut out for the job, and that neither are his equally power-hungry siblings: Shiv (Sarah Snook), a shrewd political operator; Roman (Kieran Culkin), a squirrelly nihilist; and Connor (Alan Ruck), a nincompoop libertarian. There are other candidates, including Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen), Shiv’s sycophantic, tortured husband, who also works at Waystar, and Gerri Kellman (J. Smith-Cameron), a general counsel with a naughty side. The underdog pick is Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun), an ingenuous arriviste who, long-limbed and blunder-prone, provides much of the show’s comic relief. For two seasons, these characters circled the meaty morsel of the C.E.O. role like Cartier Tank-wearing vultures. But Logan held fast to his power, even after falling ill, and took a gladiatorial pleasure in keeping his children champing at the bit, undercutting one another and exchanging inventively snippy verbal bitch slaps in their fight to be Daddy’s No. 1. It was all very “Buddenbrooks,” by way of “Veep.”

The end of the second season seemed to signal a potential sea change. A congressional investigation into a coverup of sexual assaults at Waystar had necessitated a fall guy. “The Incans, in times of terrible crises, would sacrifice a child to the sun,” Logan told Kendall, who agreed to assume culpability for the scandals in order to stabilize the company. But, when it came time to do so, Kendall ditched his prepared remarks and announced that his father was a “malignant presence,” fully responsible for the ample wrongdoing at Waystar. It was time for heroic earnestness, clean hands, corporate oversight. Was the boy, at long last, becoming a man? Was Logan, as Shiv wonders to Roman, “toast”?

As if. Season 3 might not open with Kendall rapping, but, in many ways, we’re right back at the beginning. His Judas moment made for a great cliffhanger, but he doesn’t have a real plan for overthrowing Logan that wouldn’t also result in the Roys losing the company altogether. The first few episodes take place in the days leading up to a shareholders’ meeting, which will determine whether Waystar is to remain in family hands. (This mirrors Season 1, whose first half worked toward a board meeting foretelling a potential company upset.) The prospect of a D.O.J. investigation looms. Still, not an awful lot happens. Logan, who is holed up in Sarajevo in order to guard against extradition, continues to shuffle his underlings like cards, picking one and then another as potential successors and also as possible prison-bound scapegoats. The oft-whispered question “Is it me?” might refer to either role, and though the former is obviously better, the latter has its advantages. In one amazing moment, when Tom suggests to Shiv that he should offer himself as the fall guy, his wife calls the idea “punchy,” saying that it will “bank gold” with Logan.

Kendall lands a couple of victories, including securing the star defense attorney Lisa Arthur (Sanaa Lathan), whom Logan is vying for, too. (Her choice is a bad omen for Logan: according to Shiv, Lisa “fucking loves winning, and she loves money.”) But even as Lisa urges Kendall to focus on getting his story straight in order to avoid indictment, he is much more interested in politicking with his siblings, the only people, besides his father, whose opinions he truly cares about. (It is as if all his ideas about staging a corporate takeover stem from having watched a TV show like “Succession.”) During a secret meeting, which, in a nice, infantilizing touch, takes place in Kendall’s tween daughter’s bedroom, he nearly persuades his siblings to team up with him against their father. They demur only when they realize that Kendall, just like Logan, won’t give up the prize of being C.E.O.

In the hands of less able custodians, this kind of narrative rehashing would become bland, but as I watched the new season it felt as if “Succession” were becoming more pleasurably itself with every episode, drilling down even deeper into its core as a study of the human thirst for domination. With its sweeping canvas and cinematic feel, the series has all the trappings of an HBO drama, and it is often compared to “The Sopranos,” another show that documented seasons-long power struggles. The more apt comparison, however, might be a sitcom. There are times when the series feels almost Seinfeldian in its cyclical efforts to capture a group of eccentric, petty characters as they try, again and again, to one-up one another.

What makes any good sitcom work is an ability to repeat itself with small differences. Kendall is still a wimp who swings between self-satisfaction and an insatiable hunger for reassurance, and Strong is fantastic in his portrayal of this back-and-forth. But in Season 3 he fashions himself as a woke warrior, which opens up new satirical avenues for the show. “Fuck the patriarchy,” this patriarch manqué shouts at the press on his way into a charity gala. “Another life is possible, brother,” he tells Tom, urging him to leave Logan’s camp. (“Fuck you, plastic Jesus,” Shiv tells Kendall at one point, hitting the nail on the head.) He is also obsessed with tracking the public’s response to his newfound reputation as a whistle-blower, asking Greg to “slide the sociopolitical thermometer up the nation’s ass and take a reading.” The hapless sidekick checks Twitter and notes that Kendall is “the No. 1 trending topic, ahead of Tater Tots.”

Later, Shiv, whom Logan appoints as Waystar’s president, gives a speech at a company town hall to reassure employees that a new chapter of corporate responsibility has begun. “I’m here to tell you: we get it,” she says, as we watch a company flack in the audience mouth the words along with her. As Shiv goes on, her voice is drowned out by Nirvana’s “Rape Me,” emerging from a speaker that Kendall has placed above the auditorium. The Gen X grunge anthem is intended as a righteous signal of alliance with the women who’d suffered at the hands of Waystar, but it comes off as a cheap gimmick, an act of solidarity that is just as canned as Shiv’s largely decorative role. (As Kendall tells her, “Girls count double now, didn’t you know? It’s only your teats that give you any value.”)

“Succession” doesn’t offer any true liberal alternatives to the conservative monolith that is Waystar. All attempts to undermine Logan’s empire are toothless, whether they take the form of rote jokes served on a late-night show called “The Disruption” (the host is played by the comedian Ziwe) or the vision of the company’s future that Kendall outlines to his siblings. (“Detoxify our brand and we can go supersonic.”) Even Shiv, who in previous seasons was portrayed as the progressive Roy, is easily enveloped in the company’s embrace. In “Succession,” ideological differences don’t matter. Arguably the biggest threat to Logan’s regime this season is a Noah Baumbach-vibes shareholder (Adrien Brody), who puts the C.E.O. to the test simply by taking him on an idyllic stroll. ♦