Matthew Macfadyen wears an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak

On Tom Wambsgans's wrist in Succession, the watch barely shows: a few links of brushed steel bracelet at the cuff, the case itself tucked under the fabric next to a plain gold wedding band. What is hidden is an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Chronograph. Danny Milton, the Hodinkee editor who consulted on the show's fourth-season watches, told GQ it was "so on point with his finicky wine taste, his outward love of his luxury lifestyle, and his desire to never give that up."

Matthew Macfadyen plays Tom, the in-law, the man who married Shiv Roy and then spent the series working to keep the family from remembering he was not born into it. The Royal Oak suits that, though not for the reason it now looks. Gérald Genta drew it in 1972, and Audemars Piguet unveiled it at Baselworld that year, in the depth of the quartz crisis, when mechanical Swiss watchmaking was widely written off. It was steel, with an octagonal bezel pinned by exposed screws and a bracelet built straight into the case, and it was priced like a watch made of gold. The gamble is what made it.

So the watch that now signals inherited certainty began as the costly outsider that bought its way in, which is Tom Wambsgans in a single object. The chronograph only presses the point. Genta's original told the time and the date and stopped there; this one adds the pushers and the subdials, the kind of busywork the born-rich never bother to flaunt, worn by the one man still trying to prove he belongs.