Lots to like in Season 2 of Succession, even if there are few likable characters

A note or two on the HBO series Success, Season 2, which pretty much picks up where S1 left off and maintains the same pace and the same tensions, as we watch the members of the Roy family engage in a dynastic fight to control the corporate enterprise and in Oedipal struggles to unseat or deracinate the family patriarch, Logan Roy. Again this series plays close to the playbook of the Murdoch communications enterprise, though without, surprisingly, much of a direct or even indirect nod to the Trump administration - not sure why. The strengths remain the great ensemble performances, with every cast member in and out of the family holding up the standard, the occasionally hilarious and demanding script, so intense at times that it drove us to watch w/ closed caption so as not to miss a quip, and the seeming inside knowledge about corporate finance and malfeasance. Whether accurate or not, who knows?, I suspect no more accurate that ER was about hospitals or for that matter Newsroom about journalism. Still it's fun to watch and to imagine that Fox news is run by a cast of vipers - maybe that's not so hard to imagine. On the downside, there are few, maybe no, likable characters, though at times we feel empathy for all of them except the patriarch. And though I'm no language prude I find the extreme vulgarity and profanity throughout the series troubling mainly because it's a cheap and easy way to write: If Logan Roy, for ex., said "fuck" one-tenth as often as he does in this series the word, and its attendant expression of anger/frustration, would be 20 times more powerful. Still, a totally engrossing and entertaining series throughout - and plenty still to come in an S3 I'm sure.