The second season of Succession, HBO’s darkly funny drama about billionaire tycoon Logan Roy (Brian Cox) and his restive, grown-up children, opens with an episode called “The Summer Palace,” even though it takes place in the winter. The title refers to the Roys’ Hamptons home, which requires a staff of dozens to maintain, even during the quiet season. As the family travels from Manhattan to Long Island, we see a cadre of laborers dusting off wall sconces, polishing the parquet floors to a glassy sheen. These skittery preparations have a decidedly Upstairs, Downstairs feel to them. Of course, as Succession slyly asserts over and over, there is not a lot of difference between today’s impossibly rich clans and those of the Gilded Age. Money, and the entitlement and blithe misery it brings, transcends space and time: All wealthy families are alike, even if each wealthy family is full of assholes in its own way.

The Roys are gathering for a family meeting, called by Logan, the scowling Rupert Murdoch-esque CEO of the behemoth corporation Waystar Royco, whose crown jewel is a conservative news channel called ATN (think Fox News on steroids). At the end of the show’s first season, a rival financier and his colleagues attempted a hostile takeover of Waystar. Now it’s time to strategize and regroup. Logan has no intention of selling the company he has spent his life building, and needs all his children to join forces against the enemy. This is not an easy task, since each of his children, Connor (Alan Ruck), Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Siobhan or “Shiv” (Sarah Snook), and Roman (Kieran Culkin), believes he or she has a claim to the corporate megafortune and has developed sophisticated ways to sabotage the others and themselves.

Kendall spent much of the first season taking aim at the king and missing. When Logan suffered a stroke early in the season and began behaving erratically, Kendall saw his father’s weakness as an opening for his own ambitions. He rallied enough board members, including his natty, misanthropic younger brother Roman, to push his father out, but when the day arrived, he was stuck in traffic and could not whip up votes over the phone. Soon after, it was Kendall who handed his father the takeover paperwork in a coldhearted act of patricide.

But Kendall quickly lost his advantage, when he and a waiter from the estate went out in search of drugs that same night. The young waiter, high on ketamine, grabbed the wheel from Kendall and steered the car into a river. Kendall managed to free himself but couldn’t save the passenger, and as he flung himself onto a mucky riverbank, in his impeccably tailored suit, he realized that he would never be able to best his dad. By morning, Logan had erased all evidence of Kendall’s involvement with the accident—as only extreme wealth can do—thereby cutting off his son’s insurgency and ensuring his cooperation for life.

At the summer estate, Shiv and Roman plan to take advantage of Kendall’s newly weakened position. Shiv, who has been working as a political strategist for a Bernie Sanders doppelgänger opposed to everything her father believes in, is angling for her chance to leave politics behind and leap into the family business. Roman is snively and rude, somehow a top executive at Waystar despite having no management training or ability whatsoever. As he and Shiv stroll in the sand, he contemplates whether or not his father will choose him as his replacement. “Rom,” Shiv says, with false treacle in her voice. “I think you are a supertalented superstar, and I love you.” Roman looks at her with warmth that quickly melts into disdain. “You’re such a fucking bitch,” he snipes, and walks away.