When Billionaires Become Blood Sport *How The White Lotus and Succession turned wealth-watching into America’s favorite spectacle

 

There’s a moment in *Succession* where Roman Roy casually mentions spending more on a watch than most people make in a year. He says it like he’s talking about lunch. Meanwhile, in *The White Lotus*, a tech bro demands the hotel staff move a tree because it’s blocking his Instagram shot.

Both moments land like gut punches—not because they’re unbelievable, but because they’re so painfully believable.

Welcome to the golden age of “rich people are trash” television, where HBO has turned the moral bankruptcy of the ultra-wealthy into appointment viewing. *Succession* and *The White Lotus* aren’t just shows about money—they’re cultural autopsies of a society that’s finally ready to watch its elites get what they deserve.

## Two Flavors of Toxic Wealth

These shows serve up different courses in the same feast of schadenfreude:

**Succession** gives us *institutional* wealth—the Roy family empire built on media manipulation and political puppeteering. This is old money with new cruelties, where children are emotional hostages and love is just another leveraged buyout. Every conversation is a boardroom negotiation, every family dinner a hostile takeover.

**The White Lotus** serves up *performative* wealth—vacationers who’ve bought their way into paradise only to discover they’ve imported their neuroses, prejudices, and existential emptiness. These are people who think money can purchase authentic experiences, then lose their minds when the authentic experience includes consequences.

The difference? The Roys wield wealth like a weapon. The Lotus guests wear it like a costume that slowly suffocates them.

## The Art of Watching Rich People Suffer

Both shows have mastered the delicate art of making privilege painful to watch.

*Succession*‘s genius lies in its language—every line drips with corporate poison. When Logan Roy tells his son “You’re not a killer… you have to be a killer,” it’s not father-son advice. It’s a performance review from hell. The dialogue crackles with the specific vocabulary of power: “circle back,” “ideate,” “right-size.” These people have turned human connection into a business proposal.

*The White Lotus* takes the opposite approach, letting awkward silences and cringe comedy do the heavy lifting. Mike White understands that nothing’s funnier than watching someone spend $50,000 on a vacation and still find ways to make themselves miserable. The humor comes from watching people realize that money can’t buy them out of being themselves.

## What We’re Really Watching

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: we’re not just watching these shows for the laughs. We’re watching because they’re giving us permission to hate the rich.

For decades, American entertainment sold us the fantasy that wealth was aspirational. We were supposed to want to be Tony Soprano, not judge him. We were meant to envy Gatsby, not pity him. Even *Mad Men* made us kind of want to be Don Draper, despite his obvious spiritual emptiness.

*Succession* and *The White Lotus* flipped that script entirely. They invite us to gawk, judge, and ultimately celebrate when these characters face consequences. It’s not aspiration porn—it’s downfall porn.

And in 2025, that feels politically necessary. When real billionaires are buying social media platforms to amplify their personal grudges, when tech moguls treat democracy like a beta test, when wealth inequality has reached Gilded Age levels, we need stories that remind us the emperor has no clothes.

## The Invisible Architecture of Privilege

Both shows excel at showing us what wealth really costs—not just in dollars, but in human dignity.

*The White Lotus* puts the service industry front and center. Armond’s breakdown in Season 1 wasn’t just a character study in repressed rage—it was a master class in how luxury is built on exploiting other people’s labor. Every poolside cocktail, every turn-down mint, every “authentic local experience” requires someone to smile while being treated as a prop in someone else’s vacation fantasy.

*Succession* keeps the servants mostly invisible, which is its own kind of commentary. The Roy family is so insulated by wealth that normal people barely exist in their peripheral vision. Assistants hover at the edges of scenes, drivers appear and disappear without acknowledgment. The message is clear: this level of wealth doesn’t just separate you from consequences—it separates you from humanity itself.

## Death in Paradise (And the Boardroom)

Both shows understand that wealth and mortality make for compelling bedfellows.

*Succession* literally opens with Logan Roy’s declining health, turning inheritance into a blood sport. Every stroke, every health scare becomes a corporate restructuring opportunity. The show asks: what happens when an empire is built around one mortal man? Answer: the children start circling like vultures.

*The White Lotus* frames every season around a death that hasn’t happened yet. We know someone’s going to die; we just don’t know who or how. It turns each episode into a morbid guessing game: which character’s privilege will literally kill them?

The symbolism is obvious but effective: money can’t cheat death, but it can make the dying more spectacular.

## Geography as Character

The settings aren’t just backdrops—they’re statements about how wealth operates in the modern world.

*Succession* is rooted in New York’s glass towers and London’s old-money institutions. This is legacy wealth, generational power, the kind of money that thinks in dynasties rather than quarterly reports. The Roy empire feels ancient and immovable, even as it’s slowly crumbling.

*The White Lotus* is nomadic, moving from Hawaii to Sicily to Thailand. This reflects how modern wealth works: it’s mobile, extractive, always looking for new places to consume. These aren’t destinations—they’re content to be harvested for social media. The locals exist to provide “authentic experiences” that can be packaged and posted.

Together, they show us the two faces of contemporary capitalism: entrenched power and wandering consumption.

## Why We Can’t Look Away

These shows work because they’re giving us something we desperately need: moral clarity.

In real life, wealth inequality is abstract. Statistics about billionaires are just numbers. But watching Kendall Roy fail another coup attempt or seeing a tech entrepreneur have a meltdown because the Wi-Fi is slow? That makes inequality visceral, personal, satisfying.

We’re living through the most dramatic wealth concentration in human history, where a handful of individuals control more resources than entire nations. Meanwhile, teachers are buying classroom supplies with their own money and medical bankruptcies are routine. *Succession* and *The White Lotus* don’t solve that inequality, but they do something almost as valuable: they make it impossible to pretend wealth is virtuous.

## The Morality Play We Needed

These shows work as modern morality tales precisely because they don’t moralize. They don’t tell us wealth is bad—they show us what wealth does to people, and let us reach our own conclusions.

*Succession* reveals how institutional power hollows people out from the inside. The Roy children aren’t evil—they’re broken, shaped by a system that values winning over being human. We see how Logan Roy’s empire doesn’t just dominate media markets; it destroys everyone it touches, including his own family.

*The White Lotus* shows how consumer wealth creates a different kind of damage: the spiritual emptiness of people who mistake purchasing for living. These characters aren’t necessarily bad people, but they’ve been conditioned to believe money can solve problems it actually creates.

## The Cultural Moment

We’re watching these shows at exactly the right historical moment. After decades of “greed is good” messaging, after economic crashes caused by financial speculation, after watching tech billionaires play rocket ship while cities struggle with homelessness, audiences are ready for stories that treat extreme wealth as pathology rather than aspiration.

*Succession* and *The White Lotus* aren’t just entertainment—they’re cultural therapy. They let us process our rage at inequality by watching fictional rich people suffer fictional consequences. It’s not revolution, but it’s catharsis.

## The Mirror We Hold Up

Ultimately, these shows ask uncomfortable questions about us, the audience. Why do we watch? What do we get from seeing the wealthy suffer? Are we looking for justice, or just enjoying the spectacle?

Maybe both. Maybe that’s okay.

In a world where real billionaires face precious few real consequences, where wealth insulates people from accountability, where money really can buy different justice, perhaps we need fictional spaces where the rich finally pay prices that feel proportional to their damage.

*Succession* and *The White Lotus* give us something the real world often doesn’t: the satisfaction of watching power held accountable, of seeing privilege punctured, of witnessing wealth revealed as the hollow performance it often is.

They remind us that beneath the private jets and infinity pools, the ultra-wealthy are just as petty, insecure, and mortal as everyone else. The only difference is they’re destroying everything around them while they figure that out.

And for two hours a week, we get to watch them burn.

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**Watch Next:**

- [Stream Succession and The White Lotus on Max](affiliate-link)

- [The White Lotus soundtrack - Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s haunting scores](affiliate-link)

- [Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas - Essential reading on wealth and power](affiliate-link)

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