Kieran Culkin wears a Rolex Datejust

Roman Roy is the youngest and most volatile of the Roy children, all provocation and deflection, the one who jokes to avoid ever saying what he means. Kieran Culkin plays him, and you might expect the loudest watch in the family to sit on his wrist. Instead, for most of Succession, Roman is a Rolex man, and the Rolex is a Datejust.

The Datejust is the most quietly ubiquitous luxury watch there is. Rolex introduced it in 1945 as the first wristwatch with an automatically changing date in a window, and it has been the default steel dress-sports Rolex ever since, the watch of managers and executives who want Rolex reliability without a diver's flash. Roman's is a steel one on a bracelet, understated by Roy standards.

There is something fitting in the second son settling for the safe, standard-issue Rolex while his siblings reach for Pateks and Richard Milles. Roman spends the show insisting he does not care about any of it, and a Datejust is exactly the watch of a man performing indifference to a game he is desperate to win.