Plots about inheritance and succession are not a new phenomenon. The form could hardly be more familiar: Take an empire-straddling lion-in-winter, throw in some desperately competing heirs and watch as the shifting allegiances and loyalty tests devolve into bedlam. The Gospel of Luke gives us the parable of the prodigal son, in which one child does his duty and the other squanders his inheritance. Shakespeare had King Lear go mad after disinheriting his youngest and being betrayed by his older daughters.
Still, even by the accustomed standards, recent television feels utterly awash in succession-themed stories. “Empire,” “Yellowstone” and “La Maison” all hinge on the promises and prevarications of parents and their offspring. On HBO alone, we’ve had “Succession” (children vying for control of a media empire), “The Righteous Gemstones” (children vying for control of a religious empire) and “House of the Dragon” (children vying for control of the family dragons).
Neither is this trend reserved for fiction. Two recent documentaries revolve around an emergent archetype in succession stories: the crusty, vainglorious old man whose megalomaniacal allegiance to his business empire supersedes his capacity for common decency.
Released in September, the six-part Netflix documentary “Mr. McMahon” explores the legacy of professional wrestling’s most consequential overlord, Vince McMahon, who took over the hardscrabble World Wrestling Federation — previously owned by his father, Vince McMahon Sr. — and transformed it into a global juggernaut. By the 1990s and 2000s, World Wrestling Entertainment (having changed its name in 2002) was drawing huge ratings by dramatizing McMahon’s dueling with his two children, Stephanie and Shane, who both desired, in the W.W.E.’s story line, to compete with and succeed their autocratic father.
Professional wrestling is, famously, a strange admixture of reality and fiction; its in-ring beefs are often exaggerated versions of offscreen animosities. “Mr. McMahon” reveals the extent to which the McMahons’ televised rivalries were true to life. Shane, in particular, butted heads with his father around the height of what is known in wrestling lore as the Attitude Era. The two men ended up battling each other at WrestleMania 17 in 2001, following weeks of onscreen drama regarding the future of the W.W.E. The ensuing “street fight,” as it was billed, turned nasty as the father peppered his son with actual punches, rather than the usual pulled shots. It is unpleasant to watch and hard to turn away from.
The wealth hoarding of older generations may be the lurking subtext of all these plots.
Later, in real life, the patriarch declared that he would only cede the business to his son if he literally stabbed him in the heart. (This feels extreme even for the wrestling industry.) As age, scandal and allegations of sex crimes (which he has denied) forced Vince McMahon to finally let go of the reins, leadership was handed in part to Paul Levesque, who wrestled under the moniker Triple H and who happened to have married Stephanie McMahon. Shane was functionally left out. “I would advise anyone, don’t bring your family into the business,” Vince says in the documentary. “It’s brutal, and somewhere along the line, it’s going to explode.” The strange thing, to me, is how happy he looks when he says this.
That same unctuous relish oozes from George Coulam, the tyrannical figure at the center of “Ren Faire,” a three-part documentary that debuted on Max in June. Coulam is the founder of the wildly popular Texas Renaissance Faire, which, according to its website, attracts up to 500,000 attendees per year. Its success has made Coulam both opulently wealthy and steadily more eccentric, and “Ren Faire” traces the perverse bureaucratic gyrations he uses to control the business’s future. The first episode, “Daddy’s Dyin’, Who’s Got the Will?” revolves around his supposed decision to commit assisted suicide and his determination to pass the Faire on to the underling he considers most qualified.
We meet many contenders. There is the endlessly tolerant and vaguely pathetic general manager Jeff Baldwin, whose loyalty to Coulam ultimately makes him a pawn. Then there is the hypercapitalist caffeine junkie Louie Migliaccio, self-identifying as the Lord of the Corn owing to his successful kettle-corn stand, imagining a future in which Renaissance Faires have electronic dance music soundtracks and start universities. But as the octogenarian Coulam puts his employees through the paces of making their pitches, you come to sense that he is just playing a game — that he has no intention of selling and is simply trying to remain the center of attention.
“Ren Faire” begins as a look into a niche subculture, but it evolves into a meditation on the wealth hoarding of older generations — the topic that may be the lurking subtext of all our recent succession plots. In March, no less an austere outlet than The Economist published an article headlined “Baby-Boomers Are Loaded. Why Are They So Stingy?” Roughly 52 percent of American prosperity, it reported, is situated among boomers and their elders — even as those generations enjoy the years during which younger taxpayers transfer more wealth and benefits in their direction.
Stinginess is a harsh verdict to lay on a large and diverse demographic. But it does seems fair to wonder if our hefty slate of succession-themed shows and films (there are also, among others, “The Will,” “The Inheritance,” “Inheritance Wars: Who Gets the Money?” and “The Crown”) is standing in for intergenerational conversations too delicate to have in real life. Advances in medical care and robust entitlements have made a vigorous old age not just viable but expected. That is a wonderful thing, but it does come at a cost for younger people — a pileup of housing shortages, slower career advancement and underinvestment in things like schools. Much has been written about why younger people are having fewer children, but seldom does the quiet part get spoken aloud: They face the daunting prospect of raising children with less money than their parents had, plus the task of helping to take care of those same parents during their decline.
As “Mr. McMahon” and “Ren Faire” are keenly aware, that “decline” part is where a tricky circumstance becomes an impossible one. Both series’ dictatorial subjects are no longer at the top of their game but are either unaware of or unwilling to acknowledge it. Coulam and McMahon are absurd, almost grotesquely villainous figures, holding their viselike grip on power amid an outpouring of hard feelings. Perhaps the best thing that could emerge from stories like theirs would be greater understanding on both sides of the generational divide. Older viewers will relate to the drive and creativity required to build a business or even just a middle-class life; younger ones will relate to the frustration of endlessly awaiting a turn as the main drivers of society’s economic and political instruments. Maybe, while watching, they will see one another more clearly, too.
Whether the accumulation of wealth among the aged is an accident of history or a deliberate act of social engineering, the law is clear: What’s theirs is theirs. Short of a full-on loss of mental capacity, there is no great mechanism by which to wrest control over the resources of an elderly person, even for what appears to be their best interests. I recently needed to speak with an estate attorney and found him reeling off, in passing, a litany of wild outcomes he had witnessed lately: fortunes given over to scammers and schemers, children disinherited on the basis of misunderstanding and whimsy. So we tune in to intergenerational dramas that make manifest the anxiety that comes with this casino game. The old folks hold all the cards. Succeeding generations wonder: Will they end up Lord of the Manor or Lord of the Corn?
Elizabeth Nelson has written for The New Yorker, The Ringer, Pitchfork and others, and is a singer-songwriter for the Paranoid Style, a band based in Washington, D.C. She last wrote for the magazine about how the music industry learned to love piracy.
Source photographs for illustration above: HBO; Netflix/Everett Collection.
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