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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.