The first time I watched Succession, HBO's masterpiece about King Lear trying to run Fox News despite his idiot sons, I liked to bother my girlfriend by announcing, whenever Connor Roy showed up on-screen, that "he's rising."

If you haven't seen Succession, the joke is that Connor Roy will never rise, that he's delusional and pathetic and despised even by his siblings—and the nastier joke is that Connor Roy has already risen. On any other show, a season finale in which a character announces he's running for president would make a big deal of it; in Succession, Connor's announcement is the one thing that doesn't matter. Connor is the eldest son of Logan Roy (rich, vicious, powerful), and the only child not directly entangled in the politics of Logan's business. Instead, he secludes himself on a ranch in New Mexico (the first time we meet him, he's bragging to a small child that he has the water rights to his land, which is great, because soon "people are gonna kill each other to try to get that water"), offering lofty nuggets of "wisdom" to people who know he's full of shit.

Connor, of course, is a libertarian, convinced that money is proof of worth and that government regulation is the only thing holding humankind back; he's the kind of guy who likely thinks anti-pedophilia laws are "standing in the way of love," and at one point advises his brother-in-law that if he meets women at a sex club, he should ask them if they remember 9/11, as proof that they're legal. That said, Connor is happily monogamous, if you can call it that, with a lovely young prostitute named Willa.

The rest of the Roy family is somewhat disgusted by this. Not by Willa herself—in fact, at times they seem almost fond of her. Rather, what appalls them is the way that Connor drags Willa to family functions, as if she were the perfect counterpart to their spouses and fiancés and perfectly legitimate girlfriends. We first meet Willa at the hospital where Logan Roy is taken after a brain hemorrhage; there is a distinct fear that Logan is about to die. His daughter Shiv is there with her boyfriend Tom, who proposes to her then and there to take her mind off this "horrible day." Later, she's taken to Thanksgiving dinner, where Connor proposes exclusivity; he starts calling her his "girlfriend" even as she's in the middle of agreeing, immediately after asking her to slap his face. That dinner where Roman Roy—Logan's greasiest, tiniest son—describes her to Cousin Greg as a whore, full-stop.

It's proof of Connor's seeming simple-mindedness that he'd take a prostitute to a family dinner, to a hospital, and insist she be treated like she's family too. (After all, it's not that he's dating a sex worker: he's still paying her, and he pays her more for the privilege of monogamy.) The entire Roy family is a family of clowns, but Connor is the most blatant of the bunch: the one whose entire personality is that he's rich and thinks that being rich is good, the one who's proud of treating people and experiences like they're transactions, the one who thinks he's brilliant because nobody in the world is powerful enough to call him stupid in a way that sticks, apart from his father. But if he's a fool, he's a fool in a particularly Shakespearean sense: the kind of fool who, in his clownery, reveals an uncomfortable truth about the world he's living in.

The current matriarch of the Roy family is Logan's third wife, Marcia. Marcia is fiercely devoted to Logan, in a way that often pits her against his biological children (none of whom are hers). It's unclear whether she's representing Logan's wishes—Logan, after all, does despise his children—or acting in her own interests. One thing that's apparent, though, is that she's working to secure as much of Logan's empire for herself and her children as she can manage. It's hard to imagine her being married to Logan were his fortune not involved.

Logan, in turn, treats Marcia as more-or-less disposable. He meets a woman who runs a successful rival company, begins an affair with her, and brings her on board. When he appoints her his successor, Marcia storms out. She is, perhaps, the most dignified character in Succession, carrying herself constantly with a poise that quickly turns icy. She won't tolerate Logan's parading a strategic partnership with a younger woman. But what Logan's really flaunting is that he knows his wealth sets him apart, and lets him use and degrade and abuse everyone who wants a part of it—which is to say, everybody. Children, spouses... it makes no difference. Logan acts like he's entitled to the world, and while the world resents him for it, it more-or-less does as he pleases.

And to some degree, Logan's children each follow suit. Roman Roy begins the show dating a beautiful blonde woman who's rarely mentioned by name; partway through the first season, he lets her storm out on him and immediately picks up a new beautiful blonde woman, also rarely named. The first time we see him do anything remotely sexual—the only time we see him interested in sex for a while, since he typically acts disgusted by the thought—is when he lets his girlfriend give a waiter her number, waits for him to call her, then puts her phone between her legs; he's more aroused by the thought of possessing her, of being the rich and powerful man who gets to deny her to other men, than he is by any genuinely sexual act. Roman, like Connor, tends to say the quiet parts loud: he openly aspires to power and speaks like having power ought to end any debate, and doesn't shy from letting the women in his life know how he views them. They're disgusted, but usually they come back—and when they don't, he just moves on to the next one, as if he was only waiting for the last one to leave.

Shiv's fianće-turned-husband Tom, meanwhile, is a surprisingly sorrowful case. Yes, he openly tries to use his wife to jockey for more influence in her father's company. Yes, his attempts at ladder-climbing are almost embarrassingly transparent. But Tom also clearly loves Shiv, and sees the two of them as partners in crime, moving up in the world together... and Shiv clearly doesn't see Tom the same way. He's a convenience, at times a laughingstock, and while she loves him, she can't help but treat him the way everybody in her family treats everybody else. She'll offer him power, until it's inconvenient for her. She'll love him, so long as nothing else comes up.

On their wedding night, Shiv tells Tom she's not sure that monogamy entirely suits her; she's in tears, telling him that she's worried what this means for their marriage. She's telling him this, of course, after she's already cheated on him, with an ex-colleague whose macho seductive exterior belied the fact that he couldn't help but follow her around like a lapdog, bending over backwards for her while trying to paint it like proof that, actually, he was in charge. And Tom agrees to open their marriage, with the one stipulation being that he get to kick said ex-colleague out of their wedding reception himself. For Tom, proving that he has more power than other men is the only possible form of consolation; he takes out the rest of his marital stress on Cousin Greg, whom he's permitted to treat as a punching bag.

Tom's response to Shiv's infidelity has a uniquely masculine spin on it, just as Shiv's handling of Tom can be seen as uniquely feminine—she's tender with him in a way that none of the men in her family are with their partners, she genuinely seems to love and need him—but the pattern is still fundamentally the same. Romance in Succession is a business transaction. People with wealth and power are allowed to acquire partners; they set the terms of their relationships, while their partners cling to them solely for what they're able to provide. There may or may not be love, there may or may not be family, but beneath all that, the naked terms of arrangement remain largely the same.

Shiv may cry when she's afraid her marriage is falling apart, and she might throw herself into Tom's arms when he acquiesces to her terms, but no trace of that guilt remains when she fucks a man while her husband is out of town. The only emotion present on her face is an amused contempt for the hot-but-poor actor whose body she intends to exploit. (And he's acting in a play that Willa, of all people, wrote—so how could she possibly take him seriously?) To Shiv, her marriage represents the freedom to do as she pleases, with whomever she pleases. Isn't that the point of getting married? To be unfettered in every possible way?

The final son, Kendall—as close to a main character as Succession gets—is the only one to have had a seemingly non-transactional marriage, for all he ruined it with a coke addiction. (He's also, notably, the only one with kids, though his wife's the one with custody.) Early on, after making what he thinks is a breakthrough business deal, he talks his ex-wife back into bed with him, all while spouting a lot of bluster that she can't help but roll her eyes at. "I wouldn't say that I'm the man," he tells her, "but if there were a man, hypothetically, he might look a lot like me." They fuck, and all the while he tells her she's not leaving him, and in the morning she leaves anyway. It's the one case of a Roy's partner acting like a genuine equal, ironically by refusing to remain his partner.

But if Connor's the clown who says the quiet parts loud, Roman's the clown who thinks just saying it is the same as doing it, and Shiv's the clown who mistakes her husband's compliance for love, Ken's the one who insists he's something he conspicuously isn't: hip when he's square, a killer when he's a coward, in control of his life when he's falling apart—and a decent man when he's just his father's son. He invites a news anchor on a date, only to be informed, when he asks (and he is decent enough to ask), that she was instructed by the head of their network to "make sure he had a real good time." Such is his family's power that, to Kendall, even successful women at the top of their fields are treated like prostitutes, whether he wants that to be true or not.

It's hard to imagine anyone finding any of the Roys attractive for anything save their wealth and power. Even Shiv, the closest to likable of the lot, is profoundly self-centered and mercenary: perhaps not clinically sociopathic and narcissistic, but in practice it's hard to tell the difference. They don't do the world a scrap of good: Waystar Royco, the family company, deals in bigotry with the one hand and ruining promising new enterprises with the other. The entire family is a cesspit. But they have the world in the palm of their hands, and Succession never tires of prying apart the implications.

The plural of anecdote is not data, but: I have had a surprising number of women tell me that they prefer SeekingArrangements, the dating site that explicitly connect people looking to pay (or be paid) for dates, to sites like Tinder or Hinge—and the thing they enjoy is less the money than the transparency. Whether or not you're looking for financial renumeration in a relationship, plenty of people use the possibility of money to try and attract would-be partners. I've had friends approached by men in other states who offered them plane tickets, occupancies at mansions and villas, and all manner of expensive gifts, not because those friends were asking for it, but because those men knew that some people will exchange doubts for cash. Whether it's explicit or implied, the background radiation of capital is always in the air.

I don't mean to cast judgment here on anybody's approach to dating, whether it's what they're offering or what they're looking for. If your idea of a good partner is one who gives you access to money or opportunity, so be it; if your idea of what makes you a good partner is that you can spoil someone or treat them to extravagances they wouldn't otherwise know, well, there's certainly a market for that. Even if you're not explicitly thinking in terms of money, it's always there; financial imbalance is as real a form of inequality as any other, and the possibility that you might need your partner to find stability can create a tension that changes how you treat them, or how they treat you. 

It's telling that Connor pays Willa, first for sex, and then for exclusivity. In one way of thinking about relationships, this is the progression: first comes desire, then comes commitment, and then comes marriage and family and what-have-you. Connor hasn't proposed to Willa, and I could see him being obstinately opposed to children, but it raises the question: what would he have to pay Willa if he wanted a marriage with her? Is there a number high enough that she would consent to pregnancy and motherhood for his sake? At what point do people stop being for sale? We don't get much of Logan with the mothers of his children, but he certainly still treats them like they're his possessions; when he brought them into this world, was he thinking any less transactionally than he does now? 

Critics of marriage and monogamy sometimes accuse it of being territorial, possessive. Sometimes they'll even liken it to the notion of private property: in the way that some people think private ownership of land is itself immoral, so too do marriage critics and proponents of non-monogamy argue that it's wrong to think that someone could "belong" to somebody else. That's not the only way to think of marriage, obviously, and plenty of people have conceptions of marriage that are far more elevated and aspirational and sacred... but you'd be kidding yourself to think that plenty of marriages aren't controlling and restrictive, even kinds of bondage in their way. Some people do use monogamy to exercise control over their partner. Sometimes, commitment is a demonstration of how much somebody means to you... and other times, it's a tool to try and keep someone from finding anyone else who could mean any more.

(Though it's shrewd of Succession, I think, to put Shiv in a place of wanting non-monogamy in an exploitative way, rather than to depict possession only in the form of exclusivity and commitment. The real recurring theme is of people getting something out of others that those others wouldn't otherwise want to give; that "something" can be  exclusivity from a sex worker, or it can be non-exclusivity with a spouse. What matters is the abuse of money to coerce someone else out of their own agency, not necessarily the argument that marriage and capital are one and the same.)

Succession doesn't seem to criticize Willa for her line of work; Connor's siblings might, but the show itself cares far more about Willa's being a lousy playwright than about the fact that she takes Connor's money to fuck him. If anything, the butt of the joke there is Connor—and not even that he's frequenting a sex worker so much as that he wants his family to treat her like his loving partner. But the joke beneath that is that almost none of the Roys' partners are as far above her as the Roys would like to think: they are there because the Roys want something out of them, whether it's sex or an ally or the opportunity to be envied. And why do they stick around? Neither the Roys nor their partners ever say that part out loud.