But then I feel the show knows me and my media-obsessed ilk almost too well. It nodded in that direction earlier this season, when one of the Roy sons, Kendall, was called upon to close a fictional BuzzFeed/Gawker-style website the family owned. “It’s still a killer business,” he argued, in its defense. “All they need is adults in the room.” But his efforts nevertheless ended with the sudden firing of a newsroom full of people. Days later, Megan Greenwell, the besieged editor of the real-life website Deadspin, posted one last story, under the title “The Adults in the Room,” warning of the impact of people just like the Roys. “A metastasizing swath of media,” she wrote, “is controlled by private-equity vultures and capricious billionaires and other people who genuinely believe that they are rich because they are smart and that they are smart because they are rich, and that anyone less rich is by definition less smart.” This sort of helpless rage is now the natural state of a certain class of Americans. Once, it might have been possible to work hard, choose material comforts and sink into yuppiedom. Now, the stable footing of adulthood belongs to the über-rich, who are pulling the rug out from under everyone else.

In the best moments of “Succession,” though — and there are a lot of best moments — it’s not really interested in ratifying our rage. It toys with our presumptions about it. I’m not sure its characters think of themselves as “smart because they are rich,” or smart at all. They’re fumbling, lost. They seem self-conscious about being “terrible people,” hyper-aware that what they do is destructive. They scheme for their company but seem to regret it; they feel wounded when their plans don’t succeed; when they screw up, and someone else is hurt, they feel the weight of it. They don’t seem to be choosing their lives so much as drifting along in them, grabbing for rocks and riverbeds and anything that might offer security. Their arrogance isn’t exactly a pose, but it gets them only so far.

This is, of course, because “Succession” is a drama, and the job of the dramatist is to surface ironies that characters — and, often, the audience — can’t see themselves. Inciting the audience to jeer at these “terrible people” often feels like part of its game. Go ahead, the show encourages you, bit by bit. Take that chicken. Just don’t think of yourself as truly getting control of anything. Whatever satisfaction you feel will ferment in the pit of your stomach, while the Logan Roys of the world just order another plate.

Michelle Dean is the author of “Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion” and the co-creator of the Hulu series “The Act.”