Glitches in the Gaydar is a gay millennial’s guide to feelings, fandom and the pop culture that accidentally outed us. New drops every Wednesday and Sunday. Subscribe here. Follow IG here.

Television is incestuous. Every prestige drama is a sitcom’s bastard child, every reality show has a soap opera godparent, and sometimes a cartoon rabbit is secretly raising your favourite feminist antihero. TV doesn’t evolve in straight lines — it cannibalises itself, mutates, and dresses the same archetypes in new costumes. That’s where Unhinged TV Family Trees comes in.

It feels like a fever dream to compare HBO’s prestige tragedy about billionaires to a cult sitcom about banana stands. But once you notice it, you can’t unsee it: Succession is just Arrested Development with the laughter surgically removed.

Arrested Development arrived in 2003 as a satire of rich dysfunction. It gave us Lucille Bluth sipping martinis while casually eviscerating her children, Gob turning delusion into performance art, and Michael failing to hold a crumbling empire together. Wealth was the backdrop; humiliation was the plot.

Succession just stripped away the jokes. Logan Roy is Lucille with fewer martinis and more heart attacks. Kendall is Gob if you replace magic shows with rap battles and Spotify playlists. Shiv is Lindsay with a blowout budget and a PhD in betrayal. Cousin Greg is Buster Bluth in a taller suit. The beats are the same: inheritance as MacGuffin, power as performance, banter as bloodsport.

Both shows wield dialogue as their sharpest tool. Arrested Development gave us whip-smart one-liners (“I don’t understand the question, and I won’t respond to it”), while Succession turned insults into Shakespearean daggers (“You are a clumsy interloper, a high-strung, fuck-shoveling, flatulent little tugboat”). Different rhythms, same function: strip the rich down to their absurdity.

And underneath both, the same truth: the cruelty wasn’t an accident. The cruelty was the point.

Here’s the secret — comedy and tragedy are siblings. Arrested Development framed wealth as pathetic farce. Succession reframed it as Greek tragedy. Both ask: what happens when you give obscene power to people emotionally stunted at childhood? The answer: collapse.

One gives us Lucille sniping in a fur coat. The other gives us Kendall breaking down in a hug that feels like a chokehold. Both are hilarious, both are heartbreaking — the only difference is tone.

Queer audiences picked up on the overlap quickly. Gob’s flamboyant illusions were drag in everything but name. Greg’s desperate attachment to Tom read like a doomed queer crush, steeped in camp absurdity. Both shows revel in the drama of performance, of longing, of wanting approval you’ll never get. It’s a queer tragedy either way — the only question is whether you laugh or cry.

So yes, one show aired on Fox and got cancelled for being “too weird.” The other aired on HBO and won Emmys for being “prestige.” But the DNA is the same: rich families eating themselves alive while we watch from a safe distance.

Because Succession didn’t kill Arrested Development. It just rebranded it in blackout poetry, stripped away the punchlines, and left us staring at the same banana stand — this time with blood on the walls.