Succession’s Kendall Roy is a perpetual exile who keeps returning to the family business, only to be wounded and cast out again. Each return raises the stakes because we know the pattern—but we still hope he might break it.

That is the hook. That is why this genre will never die. We are all, for better or worse, starring in our own family drama. We are just waiting to see how the next scene plays out.

Nothing disrupts a family’s equilibrium like a long-absent member returning home.

In Arrested Development , Michael Bluth is the Golden Child who can’t stop cleaning up the messes of his siblings (the Black Sheep). The comedy is tragic because Michael is also blind to his own smugness. He’s not the hero he thinks he is.