With House of Guinness, Netflix Appeals to Our Succession Obsession

Watching children squabble is annoying. Unless it’s about inheritance; then, it turns out, it’s theater.

For thousands of years, dramas spanning Aeschylus’ Oresteia to William Shakespeare’s King Lear to James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter have grappled with the question of family succession. A king might love all of his children equally, but only one of them can sit on the throne. Parents are pitted against children, children against one another and, in the case of several Greek tragedies, everyone against everyone else.