Nicholas Braun wears a Rolex GMT-Master

In a limousine after a gala in the third season of Succession, Cousin Greg asks his cousin Kendall for the green light on a very expensive Rolex, a Submariner a dealer is offering at forty thousand dollars. Kendall tells him to do it, that he deserves it, then at the afterparty mocks the idea that he ever meant to pay, he had only hooked Greg up with the connect. Nicholas Braun plays Greg Hirsch, the tall, anxious poor relation the Roy family keeps around as a pawn, and the watches the show puts on him mark how far he has climbed.

By the final season Greg has his Rolex, and it is not the Submariner. It is the GMT-Master "Pepsi," which in current production means the reference 126710BLRO, a 40mm steel case with a red-and-blue bezel and a 24-hour hand for reading a second time zone at a glance. The watch was cast as carefully as the role. Danny Milton, then managing editor at Hodinkee, advised on the show's watches and gave each character a shortlist, and Greg's Rolex came off his. "They wanted a Rolex for him," Milton told GQ.

The steel Pepsi lists for about eleven thousand dollars and almost never sells for that, because Rolex makes too few of them and the waitlists run for years, so it has traded well above list for a long time, often close to twice it. The show put its biggest mark, strung along a season earlier over a forty-thousand-dollar Rolex a cousin had dangled and pulled back, in one of the hardest watches in the world to buy at sticker price. By the fourth season it had moved him onto IWC as well, and the cousin the family used as a punching bag finished the series with a real collection.