It’s hard to remember how we thought in the years leading up to 2016, but our most accessible record of that psychologically distant era will probably be the crop of “prestige” TV shows that dominated the cultural conversation more thoroughly than any books or movies. Surveying them in hindsight, it’s clear we cared a lot about politicians: whether affectionately idealizing them (Parks and Recreation, which premiered in 2009), mythologizing them as medieval warriors (Game of Thrones, 2011) gleefully mocking them (Veep, 2012), or investing them with tawdry sexuality and menace (House of Cards, 2013).

We cared about fictional politicians because we cared about real politicians, and because in the Obama era, Washington seemed—at least to the educated liberal demographic to which these shows were targeted—glamorous and noble and idealistic. Much of Obama’s White House had consciously modeled itself on a TV show (The West Wing, which ran from 1999 to 2006), which multiple veterans of the administration have said inspired them to enter public service. Barack and Michelle Obama mingled with Hollywood celebrities and were so taken with prestige TV that they went on to produce their own Netflix shows; their chosen successor, Hillary Clinton, was a fan of The Good Wife (2009) and Madame Secretary (2014), shows written in anticipation of her seemingly inevitable turn as the first woman president.

Then 2016 happened, and everything we thought we knew about politics turned out to be mistaken. The Obamas and the Clintons got 2016 wrong, so did all their fans in Hollywood and the Beltway, and so, for that matter, did most Republicans. A confluence of forces—right-wing media, lowest-common-denominator tabloid culture, Manhattan oligarchs and their spoiled, grotesque offspring—turned out to have been badly underestimated by the political class. Going forward, power would continue to fascinate us, but we would have to reevaluate who actually wields it.

Going forward, power would continue to fascinate us, but we would have to reevaluate who actually wields it.

This is the context for HBO’s Succession, which wrapped up its brilliant second season on Sunday, and which is an early contender for the most zeitgeisty TV show of the Trump era. Succession is all but overtly inspired by the Murdoch family, whose multi-continental media empire played a crucial role in making Donald Trump’s presidency possible; the show’s creator, Jesse Armstrong (the British genius behind Peep Show and In the Loop), had previously written an unproduced screenplay about the Murdochs, and the parallels between them and the fictional Roy dynasty are too numerous to belabor. But the Roys are also a stand-in for a wider ruling class whose existence wasn’t exactly a secret prior to 2016, but which was never taken seriously enough. Only after a few years of absorbing the shock of Trump’s victory can we fully engage with the kind of people who, we now understand, are really in charge.

Tonally, Succession is best described as a comedy until it’s not, a satire that ranges from merely dark to pitch black as it continually reminds us that just because the Roys are pathetic doesn’t mean they don’t control what we watch, or how the president thinks, or whether the people working for them live or die. Much like what we’ve come to understand as political news, it’s all very funny until someone gets hurt, which happens frightfully often.