You might assume that Ginny Morris watches "Succession" differently from the rest of us.
That's because she's a member of the Hubbard family, the closest thing Minnesota has to the fictional Roys, this generation's version of the Ewings of "Dallas" but with nastier put-downs.
But Morris, who runs the Hubbards' radio division, said the drama in the hit series, which ends its four-season run at 8 p.m. Sunday on HBO, has almost nothing in common with her real life.
"It's so unrelated to me," said Morris, who oversees stations in eight major markets. "I watch it like I watch a train wreck."
Morris said that she just had lunch with her brother Stan, CEO of the Reelz cable channel in New Mexico; brother Rob, who oversees KSTP-TV and other TV stations; and dad Stanley, the 90-year-old Hubbard Broadcasting kingpin who still comes to the St. Paul office every workday. If anyone stabbed another with a butter knife during dessert, she doesn't mention it.
She won't speculate on the idea that "Succession" takes its inspiration from the Murdochs, who seem poised for a power struggle of their own when 92-year-old Rupert Murdoch passes away.
"I'm sure there are families with high levels of dysfunction, but I'd like to think the shape the dysfunction takes on the show is completely fabricated," she said.
That hasn't kept Morris from joining the millions of fans who have become obsessed with the Emmy-winning series and eager to discover which of the scheming siblings will end up with an empire. Or will they be so busy scratching each other's eyes out that a competing mogul will swoop in and take it all?
Before a winner emerges from the rubble, the show has flirted with farfetched twists. Earlier this month, we watched as the Roys' news channel called a presidential election on grounds thinner than a hanging chad. In last week's episode, Roman (Kieran Culkin), the clan's most sniveling son, threw himself into a horde of protesters, an unlikely move from someone who would cry over a paper cut.
Morris agrees that the show has occasionally ventured into the surreal. She grimaced at the Season 2 episode in which patriarch Logan Roy forced party guests to get on their knees and oink for sausages.
For a while, she thought Logan, played with Shakespearean gravitas by Brian Cox, had faked his own death to see how his kids would react.
"I thought maybe Logan had set them up. I guess that's the 'Dallas' fan in me," said Morris, referring to the moment in that '80s hit in which we discovered that Bobby Ewing wasn't dead after all.
Despite the show's often ridiculous nature, she has kept watching it. The performances and dialogue are just too rich to resist. One verbal argument between Shiv Roy (Sarah Snook) and semi-estranged husband Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) earlier this season could have been lifted from "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
Like the rest of us, Morris has no idea who will wind out on top (olgb.com, an online betting guide, puts Kendall Roy, played by Jeremy Strong, as the overwhelming favorite). At one point, she was rooting for Greg (Nicholas Braun), the inept great-nephew who probably couldn't open his own bank account.
"He's so bumbling and so needy," she said. "But he has developed his snarkiness in this last season in a way he didn't in prior seasons. For a while I found him to be the only likable one. But I'm not pulling for him anymore."
