Succession is mostly realistic, says Sherrod Brown, the U.S. senator who is chairman of the chairman of the Senate banking committee

TIME

Brown's wife, Pulitzer-winning syndicated columnist and author Connie Schultz, revealed the Democrat from Ohio was a Succession fan when she tweeted last week: "I am watching  #Succession with the chairman of the Senate banking committee and holy cannoli the ongoing commentary." In a Zoom interview this week with Time, Brown said Succession's Greg “would have been the one from that congressional hearing that they would not have let go. Even pro-corporate Republican senators, who always let corporate interests dictate their actions—their legislative actions and other political actions—he would not have gotten away with that. So the part that I knew best, the congressional hearing, was not as true to life as perhaps it could have been.” But in general, he finds Succession to be pretty realistic. "No matter what they do, no matter what mistake that would affect the rest of us might happen, they never pay a price for it, and no rules apply to them,” he says. “And it’s pretty disheartening when you think about people like that, that have so much influence on our economy and on our government. What’s distressing about it is the power that people like that have where I work, and on Wall Street, and that the voters continue to allow those kinds of people to have that kind of power in their own lives.”