Humiliation is currency among the Roys. (“Oink for your sausages, piggy!” Logan yells, during a game whose rules he has written, to people whose livelihoods depend on his largesse.) But humiliation is also currency within the series that tells the Roys’ story. Succession is an itchy show. It is a uniquely visceral show. It takes characters who assume that their wealth makes them meaningfully different from everyone else and finds new ways to remind them that they are incorrect. Greg may stand to inherit, through an accident of chromosomal collision, a quarter of a billion dollars; the sand mites that have taken residence on his person, however, care not at all about that. This is the crux of Succession’s satire: Whatever the show’s characters might have to say about it, nature has a way of biting back.

In August, as Succession’s second season was getting under way, the writer Aaron Bady argued that the show’s execution, and its “half-baked class politics,” failed to condemn the Roys in the way early episodes had suggested it might. Succession likes its characters too much, Bady suggested—and therefore makes its viewers like its characters too much—to interrogate the problems of unfettered capitalism as sharply as that subject deserves. “It is amazing who you can be made to sympathize with, if you are made to watch them suffer,” he noted, citing Kendall’s tragedies, Roman’s comedies, and Shiv’s attempts to secure the approval of a father who doubles as a boss. When King Lear is told through the eyes of the children, those children, Bady wrote, “become too pitiful to hate.” Eating the rich becomes much less appealing when the rich are so wounded and charming.

A show about extreme wealth—particularly one that aims for satire—will always walk a fine line. Succession laughs at the Roys, and it laughs with the Roys, and viewers might well find it difficult to determine where the one ends and the other begins. But the idea that Succession is too soft on its subject overlooks the aspect of the show that is both ambient and elemental: its gross physicality—its ongoing suggestion that the world the Roys inhabit is at once impossibly expensive and deeply disgusting. Succession might have empathy for its characters; it has exactly zero sympathy, however, for the environment that contains them.

Americans are accustomed to discussing the corporate world in ecological terms: landscapes, ecosystems, poaching, pouncing, clashes between the victors and the vanquished. Succession, in one way, capitulates to the metaphors. The Roy family considers capitalism itself, for the most part, a struggle to be won. They hunt. They regard people as prey. They try their best to bag the elephants. But they also treat money the way only very wealthy people are able to: as a mere abstraction. Roman buys a Scottish football team just because he can. Logan forgets how many houses he owns. Connor, not content with a role as a Broadway producer, launches a presidential campaign—one premised on the idea that the wealthy should pay no more in taxes than those who have not been so fortunate.