好英语网《继承之战》揭示了美国贪婪的现实
Like most of the great cable dramas, and to me, like so much of contemporary life, “Succession” was simultaneously tragic and comic, entertaining and horrifying. Over its four seasons, which had a grand 90-minute finale on Sunday night, it was the apotheosis of a line of dark, galvanizing, breathtakingly excellent cable dramas about a criminal-adjacent milieu, shows that also have important, big things to say about our greed-addled American reality — “The Sopranos,” “The Wire” and “Breaking Bad.” But “Succession” did something that none of its predecessors did.
和大多数精彩的有线电视剧以及——对我来说——当代生活中的很多东西一样，《继承之战》(Succession)亦悲亦喜，既娱乐又恐怖。这部共有四季的剧集在周日晚上迎来了90分钟的大结局，和《黑道家族》(The Sopranos)、《火线》(The Wire)、《绝命毒师》(Breaking Bad)一样，它可以跻身那些黑暗、刺激、令人叹为观止的优秀有线电视剧典范行列，描绘了一个与犯罪紧密相关的环境，也对我们贪婪的美国现实有着重要的、重大的启示。但《继承之战》做了一些以前的作品都没有做过的事情。
On the surface, the show blurred fiction and reality in a way that was juicy and fun. But its X factor, the reason it resonated so profoundly, was that the blurring of fiction and reality in the world the characters inhabit was a devastating commentary on the blurring of fiction and reality in the world we viewers inhabit. No other show has so skillfully used its real-time proximity to certain people and events — and did so just as life suddenly came to seem so uncertain and unreal. For 41 riveting hours over five very strange, disorienting years, “Succession” led an audience, around eight million of us this final season, into its uniquely uncanny valley.
从表面上看，这部剧以一种生动有趣的方式模糊了虚构和现实。但它的X因素，也就是它能引起如此深刻共鸣的原因，是剧中人物所处世界中虚构与现实的模糊是对我们观众所处世界中虚构与现实模糊的一种直击要害的评论。没有哪部电视剧能如此巧妙地利用它对某些人物和事件的实时接近性——而且是在生活突然变得如此不确定和不真实的时候。《继承之战》历时41个小时，跨越五年，离奇而迷茫。在最后一季，它带领着大约800万观众进入它独特的恐怖谷。
Its unlikable main characters — a superrich puppet master and his cynical, entitled children who together run a huge media corporation — are brilliant exemplars of a caste everyone nowadays really loves to hate. A critical mass of Americans has come to understand that big business and the rich hijacked and corrupted our political economy over the past several decades. The show resonated, too, because during the same period, the commingling of American TV news (and thus politics) and show business has accelerated and played a crucial role in the national unraveling.
它不讨人喜欢的主角——一个超级富有的傀儡操纵者，和他那些养尊处优、玩世不恭的孩子们共同经营着一家巨大的媒体公司——是当今人人都乐于憎恨的社会阶层的杰出典范。相当多的美国人开始明白，在过去几十年里，大企业和富人劫持并腐化了我们的政治经济。这部剧引起共鸣也是因为，在同一时期，美国电视新闻（以及政治）和娱乐业的融合加速了，并在国家的崩坏中发挥了至关重要的作用。
It was in the 1980s and ’90s, too — as a new consensus arose in Washington that the New Deal was obsolete and in New York that broadcast news was all about ratings — that the word “zeitgeist” became a cliché, because writers like me started overusing it. “Succession” has perfectly captured the current zeitgeist, with all its confusions and contradictions. This anxious moment of extreme popular anger at elites and rigged systems and 1920s-level inequality is also, of course, part of the long-running second Gilded Age. At least 53 million ordinary folks watched Vogue’s video of the rich and famous arriving at the Met Gala on May Day. The series’s huge HBO budgets afforded it the verisimilitude of endless private planes and extravagant locations filled with hundreds of extras.
同样是在20世纪80年代和90年代——那个时候，在华盛顿形成了一种新的共识，认为新政已经过时，在纽约，广播新闻只关注收视率——“时代精神”这个词成了陈词滥调，因为像我这样的作者开始过度使用它。《继承之战》完美地抓住了当前的时代精神，以及其中所有的困惑和矛盾。当然，民众对精英阶层、被操纵的体制以及20世纪20年代的不平等现象极度愤怒的焦虑时刻也是漫长的第二个镀金时代的一部分。至少有5300万普通民众观看了《Vogue》杂志在五一节拍摄的富人和名人出席Met Gala视频。HBO的巨额预算让这部剧可以逼真呈现随时候命的私人飞机，以及需要数百名临时演员的奢华场景。
Fiction based on well-known living people and real events, the roman à clef, has been popular since the 1600s and especially during the past hundred years, from “Tender Is the Night” to “The Devil Wears Prada” and, in between, the movie “Citizen Kane” — based on an heir who built a powerful conglomerate of newspapers, magazines and studios, William Randolph Hearst. “Succession” is now the “Kane” of its genre and medium, our great série à clef. The obvious models for Logan Roy, his Waystar Royco conglomerate and its American Television Network were our present-day Hearst redux, Rupert Murdoch, his News Corp and Fox Corporation and Fox News.
以知名人物和真实事件为基础的“影射小说”(roman à clef)自17世纪以来一直很受欢迎，尤其是在过去的100年里，从《夜色温柔》(Tender Is the Night)到《穿普拉达的女魔头》(The Devil Wears Prada)，还有其间的《公民凯恩》(Citizen Kane)——该片以建立强大的报纸、杂志和电影公司集团的继承人威廉·伦道夫·赫斯特为原型。如今，《继》成了自己这个类型和媒介之中的“凯恩”，是我们时代的宏大影射。洛根·罗伊、他的威斯塔-罗伊科集团及其“美国电视网”(ATN)显然是以当下的赫斯特——鲁珀特·默多克、他的新闻集团、福克斯公司和福克斯新闻为原型。
The past decade has been defined by how life, the real thing, so often resembles fiction — the first Black president succeeded by a reality TV star and serial conjurer of failed businesses, the pandemic, the astounding and scary new artificial intelligence marvels monthly. “You can’t make it up,” people say. But for those of us who turn to humor to help process the nonstop parade of weirdness, a new cultural trope was addictive: imagining that it is, indeed, all made up, that any improbable piece of news is a plot twist in a TV series or movie or digital simulation.
过去十年的主旋律是，真实的生活往往与小说如此相似——第一位黑人总统之后是经手了一系列失败生意的真人秀明星，然后是大流行，每个月都有的惊人而又可怕的人工智能新奇迹。“这种事编都编不出来，”人们说。但对于我们这些靠幽默来熬过没完没了的奇怪事件的人来说，一种新的文化修辞让人上瘾：想象这一切都是虚构的，任何不可能的新闻都是电视剧、电影或数字模拟中的情节转折。
The writers’ room ran out of ideas (Donald Trump choppering from his Covid hospitalization back to the White House for a Mussolini balcony moment). This new show is so meta (the Ukrainian comedian who played an Everyman who became president and actually became president) and so implausible (who stopped a superpower tyrant’s blitzkrieg). That season finale really jumped the shark (Jan. 6). And then last year’s hearings of the Jan. 6 committee — astonishingly effective because a former ABC News president shrewdly produced them, unlike any before, as a 10-episode multimedia TV series.
编剧们的创意已经枯竭（唐纳德·特朗普接受新冠住院治疗后飞回白宫，上演墨索里尼式的阳台时刻）。这部新剧太过“后设”（扮演成为总统的普通人的乌克兰喜剧演员后来真的当上了总统），太不可思议（他阻止了一个超级大国暴君的闪电战）。那一季的最后一集可真是在胡乱发挥（一·六事件）。然后是去年一·六事件委员会的听证会——效果惊人，因为那是由一位前ABC新闻总裁精心制作的、前所未有的10集多媒体电视连续剧。
In America at large, however, the blurring of reality and fantasy isn’t merely fascinating. Americans’ knack and weakness for these mixtures amount to a founding national predisposition — what made America the global center of show business, from P.T. Barnum to Hollywood to televangelism to reality TV. Our wise forebears also built walls between important reality over here and entertainment and make-believe over there and installed useful establishment gatekeepers to decide what belonged where.
然而，就美国整体而言，现实和幻想的模糊不仅仅是令人着迷那么简单。混淆虚实是美国人的拿手好戏，也是兴趣所在，以至于这成了一种根本的民族癖性——从P·T·巴纳姆到好莱坞，从电视福音到真人秀，正是这种癖性使美国成为全球娱乐业的中心。我们明智的祖先还在这里的重要现实和那里的娱乐与虚构之间筑起了墙，并设置了有效的建制派守门人来决定一种东西属于墙的哪一侧。
During the past half-century, those barriers crumbled gradually, then suddenly. America’s iffy grip on reality turned from a chronic condition to acute and pathological, metastasizing beyond entertainment and spreading throughout the real world, most disastrously into our information and political systems, a phenomenon for which no single individual and enterprise has been more responsible than the real-life inspirations for Logan Roy and ATN. Early this season, Logan told his children, “I love you, but you are not serious people.” He could have been talking to America, where people now feel entitled to their own facts as well as their own opinions.
在过去的半个世纪里，这些壁垒先是逐渐地，而后突然地崩塌了。美国人对现实的飘忽认知从一种慢性病变成了一种急重症，转移到娱乐之外，蔓延到整个现实世界，最严重的是蔓延到我们的信息和政治体系，对于这种现象，最应该负责任的莫过于洛根·罗伊和ATN在现实中的灵感来源。这一季开始时，洛根告诉他的孩子们：“我爱你们，但你们太不着调了。”这话完全可以是在对美国说，这个国家的人现在觉得，自己有权拥有自己的事实，就像有自己的观点一样。
The writers and producers of “Succession” adhered to rigorous verisimilitude in depicting the corporate scheming, the lust for power for its own sake, the look and feel of life inside the bubble of the very rich, an unhappy family unhappy in its own way, even the self-consciously jargony talk and strenuous insults. Its understanding of the politics of haute capitalists was also spot on. Most are not right-wing true believers like the billionaires Charles Koch and Peter Thiel but more like Logan or Rupert Murdoch: Sure, they’re on the right, mainly for personal greed-is-good financial reasons. But to Mr. Murdoch and Logan, creating streams of alarming and misleading newslike propaganda about issues they care little about was a counterprogramming business opportunity.
《继承之战》的编剧和制片人严格坚持逼真地描绘大企业的图谋，为了权力本身而去追求权力，在超级富豪泡泡里的生活面貌，一个有自己的一本难念的经的不幸家庭，甚至是刻意堆砌的行话和绞尽脑汁的辱骂。它对高级资本家政治的理解也很到位。大多数人不是像亿万富翁查尔斯·科赫和彼得·泰尔那样的真正的右翼信徒，而是更像洛根或鲁珀特·默多克：当然，他们是右翼，主要是出于个人的“贪婪是美德”式金钱原因。但对默多克和洛根来说，针对他们不关心的议题制造一系列令人担忧和具有误导性的新闻式宣传只是在抓住商业机遇，用自己的产品与友商的同类节目竞争。
At a reception, when the far-right-wing presidential nominee, Jeryd Mencken, says to Shiv Roy that he and her father were in “ideological sympathy,” she smiles and says, nah, “He was about money, winning and gossip.” In an early episode, Logan’s grandnephew Greg says that he had qualms about going to work for ATN because “it’s, like, kind of against my principles?” Logan’s executive flunky son-in-law, Tom, doesn’t buy it for a second. “Your principles?” he says. “You don’t have principles.” None of the main characters do.
在一次招待会上，极右翼总统候选人杰里德·门肯对希芙·罗伊说，他“在意识形态上赞同”她的父亲，她微笑着说，不，“他只关心钱、胜利和八卦。”在早期的一集中，洛根的侄孙格雷格说他对去ATN工作感到不安，因为“这好像，就是，有点违背我的原则？”这根本骗不到洛根的奴才高管女婿汤姆。“你的原则？”他说。“你没有原则。”全剧主要角色没有一个有原则。
Writing realist fiction about real individuals and events carries two opposing risks: going over the top, which “Succession” never did, and being too on the nose. The goal is to get exquisitely close to but never quite touch the hard reality, the way maglev technology lets high-speed trains miraculously float an inch or two above the tracks.
写关于真实个人和事件的现实主义小说有两种相反的风险：一是表现过度，而《继承之战》从未过度，二是过于如实。应该追求极其接近但永远不会真正触及严酷的现实，就像磁悬浮技术让高速列车奇迹般地漂浮在轨道上方几厘米那样。
The show’s creator and showrunner, Jesse Armstrong, made several large choices that radically diverge from reality. Our pandemic did not happen in the characters’ world. They almost never mention real public figures or companies. Dates aren’t mentioned at all. A show about contemporary news media and politics avoided dealing directly with race and racism or wokeness or other cultural warfare. The major-party presidential nominees are played by actors who are 54 and 42 — highly unrealistic these days but fine by me. And strangest of all, the words “Republican” and “Democrat" were almost never uttered, the better, perhaps, to indict the cynicism and corruption of the whole system.
该剧的创作者和执行制片人杰西·阿姆斯特朗做出了几个严重偏离现实的重大选择。我们的大流行疫情并未在角色的世界中发生。他们几乎从不提及真正的公众人物或公司。完全没有提到日期。这是一部关于当代新闻媒体和政治的剧，避免了直接处理种族和种族主义或觉醒或其他文化战争。主要政党的总统候选人由54岁和42岁的演员扮演——与当下现实极度不符，但我没什么意见。最奇怪的是，“共和党人”和“民主党人”这两个词几乎从未被提及，这或许更好地控诉了整个系统的犬儒和腐败。
The Roy family does and doesn’t resemble its inspiration. Yes, Logan was an old, tough, legendary, Anglophone immigrant who built a media empire, including a TV channel supplying right-wing commentary and news 24/7. But he is very much his own free-standing creation. Murdoch didn’t decide to sell his entertainment holdings to a Netflixy start-up owned by a Loki-like Swede, for instance, and most important, he didn’t build his business from scratch; he inherited it from his knighted father in the 1950s.
罗伊家族的设定与现实相比的确似是而非。洛根确实是个年迈而强悍、富有传奇色彩的盎格鲁移民，他创立的媒体帝国包括一个全天候供应右翼评论和新闻的电视频道。但他的成功基本由他一手写就。默多克可没有决定将自己的娱乐资产出售给一家Netflix范儿的初创公司——其所有人是个洛基(Loki)般的瑞典人。而他也并非白手起家，是上世纪50年代从有爵位的父亲那里继承的家业。
He has, however, like Logan, had several wives; also like Logan, one of those marriages produced two sons and a daughter who have competed to succeed their father. Like Kendall Roy, James Murdoch went to a fancy New York prep school and Harvard (and worked on The Lampoon) and is a rap aficionado. But unlike Kendall, James Murdoch can be funny, and as Maureen Dowd wrote in 2020, people who know both Murdoch sons refer to “James as ‘the smart brother’” and “the more interesting one,” suggesting Roman resembles him at least a bit. In her anti-ATN liberalism, Shiv is the most like James Murdoch but obviously also like Elisabeth Murdoch, who was married to a media-world schemer, was shoved aside early in the succession race and, according to Times reporting in 2019 (which she denied), had urged “her father to fire James and replace him with her.”
但和洛根一样，默多克有过几任妻子；同样，他还与其中一任生下了两个儿子和一个女儿，而这些子女都曾激烈争夺接班人之位。与肯德尔·罗伊一样，詹姆斯·默多克也曾就读于纽约一所上流预科学校和哈佛大学（也都参与过校刊《哈佛妙文》的工作），同时还是说唱发烧友。但与肯德尔不同的是，詹姆斯·默克多是会逗乐的，正如莫琳·多德在2020年所写，认识默多克两个儿子的人都说，“詹姆斯是两兄弟里‘聪明的那个’，也是‘更有意思的那个’，”这表明罗曼至少跟他有些许相似。最像詹姆斯·默多克的，是持反ATN的自由主义立场的希芙，但她显然也很像伊丽莎白·默多克，后者嫁给了一位传媒界谋划家，在继承之战的早期被边缘化，根据《纽约时报》在2019年的一篇被她否认的报道，她曾敦促“父亲解雇詹姆斯，并让她取而代之”。
The show’s dance between fiction and reality continued throughout the seven years of its creation and presentation. The cast sat down together for the first time to read the script for the first episode the same day our reality would spectacularly, disorientingly outrun fiction: Nov. 8, 2016. When Murdoch divorced his fourth wife, Jerry Hall, the settlement reportedly prohibited her from providing story ideas to the show’s writers — a fact that itself could have provided a story idea for the show’s writers. After Season 2 ends with Kendall righteously turning against his father and then with the series on a pandemic-enforced hiatus, real life went totally “Succession”; in eight months, James Murdoch resigned, Mr. Trump attempted his illegal overturning of the election, and the big voting machine companies brought lawsuits accusing Fox News of knowingly, repeatedly lying about them.
在创作和播出的七年时间里，这部剧始终在虚构和现实之间来回跳跃。2016年11月8日，全体演员首次围读第一集剧本，而在同一天，我们现实世界发生的夸张剧情令人惊异地超越了虚构。据悉默多克与第四任妻子杰里·霍尔离婚时，协议要求她不得向本剧编剧提供故事构思——这一事实本身就已经能为这部戏的编剧们带来灵感了。第二季完结时，肯德尔大义灭亲，之后该剧制作因疫情中断，现实生活则彻底演活了《继承之战》；在八个月时间里，詹姆斯·默多克辞职，特朗普试图非法推翻大选结果，为大选供应投票机的企业纷纷状告福克斯新闻明知故犯，一再撒谎。
James Murdoch told Ms. Dowd he quit the family company because of Fox News’s blurring of fiction and reality. “You can venerate a contest of ideas,” he said. “But it shouldn’t be in a way that hides agendas. A contest of ideas shouldn’t be used to legitimize disinformation.” He added, “I think at great news organizations, the mission really should be to introduce fact to disperse doubt — not to sow doubt, to obscure fact.”
詹姆斯·默多克告诉多德，他之所以离开家族企业，是因为福克斯新闻混淆了什么是虚假，什么是真实。“观点冲突可以存在，”他说。“但不能夹带私货。观点冲突不应成为虚假信息正当化的借口。”他还表示，“我相信对出色的新闻机构而言，使命应该是用事实驱散怀疑，而不是散播怀疑的种子，掩盖事实。”
In 39 episodes of “Succession,” no Roy family member or any other character I can recall ever said anything remotely similar about the nature of truth and journalism and the marketplace of ideas — let alone with such apparent sincerity. “Your principles? You don’t have principles.”
在《继承之战》的39集剧情中，我不记得有哪位罗伊家族成员或其他人物对真相本质、新闻和自由意见市场发表过哪怕是沾点边的类似见解，更遑论展示如此的诚意。“你的原则？你没有原则。”
The writers, with their masterly fiction-reality maglev trick, only once let the speeding “Succession” train come too close and screechingly scrape the track of important hard fact: in the election night episode two weeks ago, set almost entirely at ATN headquarters. From the start of the series, the producers made the counterintuitive (and, to my mind, correct) creative choice never to show the ATN sausage being made or served. A realistic dramatic series about making TV is almost impossible to do well and, when it depicts characters covering and commenting on recent actual events (HBO’s “The Newsroom”), easy to do terribly.
编剧们的高超技巧让虚构无限贴近于现实，却不与之融合。只在一场戏里，高潮太过接近现实，让观众听到了剧情擦过重大真相的刺耳噪音：两周前播出的大选夜剧情，场景基本全设在ATN总部。从这部系列剧的开端，制片方在创作上的反直觉（在我看来也是正确的）选择就是从不展示ATN制作或播放的内容。一部讲述电视制作的现实主义剧情类剧集几乎不可能叫座，要是剧中人物还对最近发生的真实事件进行报道和评论（譬如HBO的《新闻编辑室》），反响则很可能相当糟糕。
The “Succession” election night mixes our past two actual ones — 2016, when a fascism-friendly Republican candidate won a surprise victory, and 2020, when Fox News went out on a limb before midnight to say accurately he’d lost Arizona, kicking off days of close-swing-state uncertainty before he was finally declared the loser.
《继承之战》描述的大选夜是过往两届现实大选夜的糅合——2016年，一个对法西斯主义态度友好的共和党候选人意外获胜，以及2020年，福克斯新闻在午夜时分大胆而准确地断定这位候选人输掉了亚利桑那州，随之而来的是摇摆州持续数日的选局动荡，直到他最终承认败选。
On “Succession,” the Roy children are in and around the newsroom on election night, managing details of coverage in real time. (As far as we know, no Murdoch ever did anything like that.) They go way out on a limb to declare the fictional fascism-friendly Republican candidate the winner in still-undecided Wisconsin and therefore the president-elect, and they do it in exchange for his agreement to assist in a business scheme, resulting in an unequivocally corrupt, undemocratic election — coincidentally, what the real-life fascism-friendly ex-president claims happened to him in real-life 2020.
在剧中的大选夜，罗伊家的孩子们在新闻编辑室忙里忙外，实时管控报道的细枝末节。（据我们所知，默多克从未做过这样的事。）他们不管不顾地宣布，对法西斯主义态度友好的虚构共和党候选人拿下了仍未公布结果的威斯康辛州，因此成为候任总统，他们之所以这么做，是为了换取候选人对一项商业计划的协作，结果导致了一场公然腐败的非民主选举，巧合就在于，现实里对法西斯主义态度友好的前总统宣称，这就是2020年真实发生在他自己身上的事。
For people horrified by Mr. Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, then nerve racked by the long wait for a final result in 2020 and now uneasily imagining a Trump re-election in 2024, the fictional worst-case hybrid of “Succession” was retraumatizing and dread inducing. I found it problematic for a different reason.
对于那些因特朗普2016年的意外胜选倍感惊悚，然后被2020年最终结果的漫长等待折磨得神经紧张，如今又对特朗普2024年再度当选的前景惶恐不已的人来说，《继承之战》虚构出的最坏情况混合体完全就是重新体验那种创伤，并诱发出内心的恐惧。但我认为这段剧情的问题不在于此。
We’ve now seen proof that Fox knew the stolen-election conspiracy theories it pushed after election night 2020 were false and that it pushed them to pander to what its audience wanted to hear. At our precarious moment in the real life and potential death of the Republic, for “Succession” to tease its audience’s suspicions and fears with such a hyperrealistic alternate-facts version of a recent election bordered on the irresponsible.
我们现在看到的证据表明，福克斯知道自己在2020年大选夜后推动的大选结果被窃取的阴谋论是错误的，它之所以传播这种阴谋论，就是为了迎合观众喜好。而对于现实中合众国所面临的可能决定其生死存亡的危急关头，《继承之战》用这样超写实主义的手法描绘了一场近期选举的另类事实，以此拨弄观众的怀疑和恐惧心理，可以说是不负责任的。
But that was it for politics on “Succession.” Immediately afterward, Logan was buried, with dueling eulogies that eloquently summarized his most winning and monstrous qualities. It was, to quote Fox News’s former slogan, a fair and balanced funeral. And by the show’s finale, the only voting that mattered was that of the board of directors deciding whether to sell the family business out from under the scheming, incompetent heirs.
但这部剧的政治也就到此为止了。紧接着的剧情就是洛根的下葬，相互矛盾的悼词深刻总结了他最强大也最可怕的品质。用福克斯新闻曾经的口号说，那真是一场公平公正的葬礼。到本剧大结局，董事会对是否出售这个由勾心斗角却又无力胜任的继承人们掌控的家族企业进行投票，那才是唯一重要的表决。
ATN’s corrupt presidential election night call may not have worked after all, with the Wisconsin votes still up in the air and the Roys’ bad guy no longer seeming a lock for the Oval Office. But that’s barely, passingly mentioned. Democracy? The nation’s future? Incidental to the real business at hand.
到最后，ATN在总统大选夜做出的腐败堕落的裁断可能也没起作用，因为威斯康辛州的结果仍然悬而未决，罗伊家族支持的坏人似乎也不再胜券在握。但这些情节均被草草带过。至于民主和国家的未来？这跟他们手头的要紧事可没关系。
For a while, the last episode let us believe that the Roy kids had grown a little, were capable of something like ordinary sibling fun, playing in the ocean, goofing around late at night in their mother’s kitchen. In the hard light of the business day, however, they were out only for themselves. Roman ran away, Shiv pulled maneuvers worthy of her name, and Kendall showed that the truest, hardest fact of your life can be transmuted into fiction if the princeling wishes it. In “Succession” there were no redemptive character arcs. It was beautifully ugly from beginning to end.
最后一集的剧情一度让我们相信，罗伊家的孩子们成熟了一点，起码能感受普通人的手足情意，比如在大海里玩耍，深夜在母亲的厨房嬉闹。然而一到冷峻的工作日，他们还是那么自私自利。罗曼逃跑了，希芙拿出了配得上自己名字的手段（希芙[shiv]也有剃刀之意。——译注），而肯德尔的结局则表明，只要太子党愿意，一个人生活中最真切苦涩的事实都能成为泡影。《继承之战》没有救赎式的人物成长。它从头到尾都是一种美丽的丑恶。
As it finished, the show managed to separate itself from the real-life particulars that had inspired and energized it. Its fictional world was all its own. But it spoke to ours powerfully. In time the chatter about the Roy children (and Tom!) will die down, along with the debates about the allure or loathsomeness of their tastefully lavish lives. What should linger are its truths about the corrupting effects of untethered power, the unfathomable cynicism of people in high places, the failure of billions to buy happiness and, most of all, today’s mesmerizing, confusing, terrifying interplay of fact and fantasy.
在终结之时，这部剧成功地让自己和真实世界中那些启发、催动了它的细节划清了界限。它营造了属于自己的虚构世界。但这个世界与我们现实世界的关联是强有力的。随着时间推移，关于罗伊家的孩子们（还有汤姆！）的流言蜚语终将平息，对他们奢华精致生活感到或诱惑或厌恶的争论也会消散。应被铭记的，是剧中关于权力不受约束的腐败效应的真相，身居高位之人难以想象的玩世不恭，用万贯家财收买幸福的失败企图，以及最重要的一点——当下现实与虚幻交织所带来的迷惘、困惑和恐惧。