Nicholas Braun wears a Rolex Datejust

In the lobby of Waystar Royco, the Roy family's media company, Greg Hirsch stands with both hands in his pockets and a steel Rolex showing at his cuff. Nicholas Braun plays Greg, the broke grand-nephew who arrives with nothing, talks his way onto the payroll, and climbs under Tom Wagner, the older man beside him here. By this scene someone has already chosen what goes on his wrist.

The watch is a Rolex Datejust. It has a steel case on the five-piece Jubilee bracelet Rolex built for the model, a blue dial, a date in a window at three, and a slim polished bezel with no dive scale anywhere on it. Rolex introduced the Datejust in 1945 as the first wristwatch to show the date in a window on the dial, and named the bracelet for the company's fortieth anniversary that same year. It is the usual way into a 'real' Rolex and the establishment's default dress watch, the one a young man buys, or is handed, to show he belongs in a room like this.

The joke the show tells later is that Greg could not leave the sensible watch alone. Two seasons on, with Kendall Roy egging him on, he pays a dealer around forty thousand dollars for a black-dialed Rolex diver, about twice what it was worth, and then finds it barely runs and will spend months at a time back in Switzerland for repair. The Datejust here is the one he should have kept, a Rolex that, unlike the diver two seasons ahead, actually ran.