Toward the end of the first season of HBO’s “Succession,” some corporate schemers plot a takeover strategy called a bear hug. It’s an offer that’s too much, too soon—a bid for a company’s stock that’s so high the board can’t legally turn it down. Smother your targets with largesse and you own them.

That’s the essence of family love in “Succession,” a satisfyingly nasty series that might be described as an explainer on the inner life of Jared Kushner. Created by the British comedy writer Jesse Armstrong, it’s a story about rich kids clawing for control of their dad’s company, a Fox-y media conglomerate. Among the series’ many pleasures is how well it functions as a blind item about the Murdochs, the Mercers, the Redstones—families that double as brands, which is to say monarchies, which is to say Mob families. They’re groups that run the world and to whom rules don’t apply. This makes “Succession” ideally timed for the Trump era; it can also make it off-putting, initially, for anyone burned out on sympathy-for-the-Devil cable shows.

Brian Cox plays Logan Roy, the Scottish-born founder and C.E.O. of Waystar Royco, a conglomerate that includes a red-meat cable network, movie and music studios, digital holdings, cruise ships, an animation division, and more. On his eightieth birthday, when everyone expects Logan to pass the reins to his son Kendall (Jeremy Strong), he balks—and, even after a stroke, he won’t step down. Chaos erupts. There’s no clear successor: Logan’s on his third marriage, to a tasteful enigma named Marcy (Hiam Abbas), and his four kids are a stunted bunch. Kendall is a drug addict with dreams of Zuckerbergian disruption; Roman (Kieran Culkin) is a hedonist slacker; Shiv (Sarah Snook) is a cynical political consultant engaged to a weirdo social climber who works for her dad; and Connor (Alan Ruck), the eldest, is a dippy egotist who has retreated to Santa Fe, to revel in libertarian hauteur. There’s also a dorky, newly arrived cousin, Greg, a pawn with aspirations.

At first, the siblings seem like venal cartoons, not unlike the “Veep” crew: they’re selfish, spoiled insult machines, particularly the brothers, who epitomize the online slogan “God grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man.” Their basic work ethic is winging it. When Roman gets an office, he walks to the window and masturbates to the Manhattan skyline, an act that he clearly sees less as a metaphor than as a job description. “I just hope the seating plan holds,” Connor announces about a benefit he’s planning. “If it does—look out, Middle East! ’Cause I can fix anything.”

The great strength of the show is that it manages to deepen these monstrous characters—to grant them meaningful context, even pathos—without glamorizing them. They’re ultrapowerful weaklings, not cathartic fantasy figures. And, for all their Mamet-y rants about screwing and getting screwed, they’re paralyzed, passive—unable to close, even at home. Kendall tries to win back his wife by stating over and over, in a trance of wishful thinking, that he’s “the man”; when Roman is alone with his eye-candy girlfriends, he peevishly bats away complaints that he never wants sex; Connor dates a call girl, who is actually a playwright, and who stares at him with the fatigued expression of a tech-support person who can’t get off the line.

The only one with a real libido and workable cunning is Shiv, a canny mashup of Ivanka Trump and the fiery-haired Murdoch lieutenant Rebekah Brooks. Her father’s favorite, Shiv knows how to negotiate; she’s certainly a more obvious choice than Kendall to run the company. “You run towards politics to prove you’re your own man,” Logan tells her. He seems to see her as virile, in a way that, in his competitive eyes, the boys can never be; her gender is less a barrier than a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Yet Shiv has a slovenly, impulsive perversity of her own. In the season finale, in one of the series’ more moving scenes, she makes a wedding-night confession to her new husband, Tom (a fantastic Matthew Macfadyen), that she’s been cheating on him with her colleague Nate (Ashley Zukerman). It’s a brutal comic setup: a bride, all in white, cuckolding her husband. In one sense, the confession is a gambit. Midway through the wedding weekend, Shiv brokered a slimy deal between her right-wing father and the left-wing politician she hopes to make President, a consummation that’s more real to her (and more exciting) than her own marriage. The one person who can block the deal is Nate; her confession motivates Tom to step up and rid her of this obstacle.

But the show’s operating principle is that just because a move is strategic doesn’t mean that the person making it feels that it is, or even knows exactly what she’s doing as she does it—and, in the remarkable performances of Snook and Macfadyen, the conversation swings crazily between cruelty and tenderness, candor and bullying. As Shiv confesses, to herself as well as to Tom—“I’m just not sure I’m a good fit for monogamous marriage”—he watches from the bed, crushed but also in awe. The camera lingers on his face as he absorbs his wife’s terror of “the whole box-set death march.” His voice gets softer, not harder. In a fever of self-justification, Shiv explains that love is ugly—it’s a con, gummed up with “fear and jealousy and revenge and control.” The wisest move is to burn it all down. In her way, she’s welcoming Tom to the family. When she tears off her dress and climbs on top of him, as they renegotiate their deal, it feels, for a moment, almost romantic.

The slam that I’ve heard on “Succession” is that it takes too many episodes to get good: the early installments are too cynical, too sour, too claustrophobic. Who wants to hang out with these awful people? Only when the plot kicks in for real—when Logan roars back into the boardroom; when the wheels of conspiracy start to turn; when pathos emerges, as the stock drops and the stakes rise—does the show gain mythic dimensions, of empires at risk, fathers killing sons, Cordelias questioning Lears, and so on.

There’s some truth to that. The second half of the season takes more ambitious leaps, letting characters like the outrageous Tom—a truly original figure, who is somehow at once craven and decent, psycho and naïve—take up the space they deserve. The show also nails its finale, an accomplishment that, in an age of expensive, poorly paced pay-cable letdowns, is its own recommendation. So what does it say that the first few episodes suited me fine? For me, the show had a pleasurable mouthfeel from the beginning, not in its largeness but in its smallness, its glory in the details—the oppressiveness of beige Upper East Side apartments; the in-laws and outsiders sharing advice; the man at a benefit throwing a fit about the butter being insufficiently warm.

A lot of the fun of “Succession” is in watching fancy parties go off the rails, from Logan’s birthday to that wedding, which takes place in a British castle. But its most striking motif is games. For the Roys, business is a game. So is therapy, so is sex. Even a Thanksgiving-dinner round of “What are you grateful for?” turns competitive. When Roman begs his brothers to confirm a terrible childhood memory, of his being treated like a dog, Kendall insists, “It was a game, you enjoyed it!” Connor tells him, “You asked to be put in the cage.” The family’s psychological stability relies on this brand of gaslighting: if everything is a game, nothing counts. All the money can feel like play money, in the end.

“Succession” has its gamelike quality as well. It’s a drama that plays as a comedy, and vice versa, with crises that feel both real and contrived. It hovers on a beautiful borderline for viewers: real enough for us to care, but stylized enough to let us stand, enjoyably, at a distance, judging. The season ends with a Chappaquiddick-like tragedy for Kendall that feels weighty and true, a showcase for Strong’s layered performance. But it also starts the game again, making the show a fable about the ugliness of endless second chances—the resource that is a family like this one’s truest wealth. ♦