Succession works because the writers don’t care about the boring business storylines

I have a theory that many great artists’ strength is a product of their weakness. The flaw of the relentlessly frivolous creator of Succession Jesse Armstrong, for example, is that he is very easily bored by grown-up subjects such as big business, finance, corporate structure, legal affairs or anything involving depth and seriousness. Which ought, you might think, to pose a major problem for someone constructing an epic drama – loosely based on the Murdoch family – about the struggle for succession in a global media empire.

But Armstrong’s saving grace is this: most viewers are not interested in such tedium either. The reason, for example, that Elisabeth Murdoch has been seen wearing a ‘Team Shiv’ T-shirt (in homage to the daughter of the Logan Roy dynasty, played by fellow red-headed Australian Sarah Snook) is probably not that she has been blown away by the uncanny accuracy of Succession’s depiction of a modern media family.