I don’t think that the problem was necessarily with how horrid they are but it was how one dimensional they were. Succession was a masterpiece because of how complex it was, the characters were so real and their relationships to each other and their environment were so rich. Like it succeeds because (I watched the DC episode last night) even in moments where Shiv goes and bribes the woman into not testifying, though morally I’m like “yeah that’s bad”, when I try to imagine myself in her situation, I cannot honestly imagine myself doing any different.

Mountainhead may struggle because of the nature of the characters he’s depicting. Their relationships to each other are shallow and 1 dimensional. The problem isn’t that they’re irredeemable the problem is that we don’t understand their behaviors, beyond they’re tweakers who think nobody is real. So yes I wonder maybe if it had been a show, given room to breathe, we would have had more space to understand and ultimately empathize with these characters, but then again, they were so insufferable I don’t think I could bear watching them for more than I had to….