Someday soon, someone will be walking down the street proudly carrying a ludicrously capacious bag, bought for a ludicrously capacious price.
The voluminous Burberry tote is one of the most famous props used on "Succession," the famed HBO saga of the Roy family dynasty, and it sold at auction Saturday for $18,750.
The show, which ran from 2018 to 2023, followed the lives of four children of patriarch Logan Roy as they fought to take over the media empire Waystar RoyCo while their father's health declined.
It often parodied the lives of the uber-wealthy, with Logan Roy being a nod to the former Chairman of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch.
The hundreds of items at the prop auction are a journey through the show: Fake magazine covers featuring the Roy family, fake sausages, and fake credit cards used to finance the Roy's wealthy lifestyle.
But that bag, which became notorious when Matthew Macfadyen's Tom Wambsgans savagely ridiculed it, wasn't even the priciest item sold from the set of the addictive drama, which is also expected to clean up at Monday's Emmy Awards on the heels of its Golden Globes wins.
No, that was a set of pink index cards containing Roman Roy's eulogy notes for his father's funeral — a speech he never gave. Beginning with, "My father Logan Roy was a great man," the four cards represent the tragic failure of Roman (Kieran Culkin) to meet the moment. They now have a new life with someone who paid $25,000 and hopefully will frame them nicely.
The online auction on behalf of HBO at Heritage Auctions in Dallas, ending Saturday, brought in a total of $627,825 for 236 lots. The results showed not only that people loved the show, says Heritage spokesperson Robert Wilonsky, but also that meaningful objects, and not the show's high-end "stealth" fashion, clicked most with bidders.
"At the end of the day, it was key moments of the show that resonated with fans," he says.
Props often take a back seat to costumes. After all, there's no award for "best props" at awards shows like there is for costumes, notes "Succession" prop master Monica Jacobs, who joined the show after the pilot episode. But prop departments go to extreme lengths to secure just the right item — even if it only appears for a few seconds.
Jacobs shared the origin stories of some of the show's most iconic props.