Modern media, valued most for holding eyeballs and generating clicks, loves quick-hit lists. Ten Best this and Greatest of All Time that. Never anything too serious you know, the crowds want to be entertained, not made to feel all gloomy and what not.

So bear that in mind as I suggest that HBO’s “Succession”, which returns for its final season tomorrow night, should be ranked among TV’s finest achievements, up there with “The Wire”, “Breaking Bad” and, ummm, “Veep”, with which it shares a lot of DNA. The soon-to-culminate saga of the gilded and truly wretched Roy family, principal owner-operators of Ameerica’s most influential mad dog conservative “news” network, is so completely locked in to the zeitgeist of this era it could pass as a documentary.

The fact that “Succession” returns at the precise moment that the Murdoch family on which it is unapologetically modeled is fighting off not one but two multi-billion dollar defamation suits for hosting and nurturing outright lies about the 2020 election is too delicious for words. (Even though I may find a few in the next couple paragraphs.)

If you haven’t watched any of the previous three seasons, I can’t help you much, other than to say the Rupert-like paterfamilias, Logan, played by Brian Cox, is currently at war with his four craven, despicable children over who gets the reins of ATN (their FoxNews-like network/money machine) when he passes on to his great reward. Needless to say none of the children trusts anyone else and all are running side scams to gut the others.

It’s a thing of goddam beauty I tell you. And it very much recalls “Veep’s” farewell in the spring of 2019, two years into the Trump “administration” maelstrom of fraud, incompetence and rampant, spinning bullshit. At the time the show’s star, Julia-Louis Dreyfus made several talk show stops joking and shaking her head at the painfully obvious fact that “Veep’s” writers simply couldn’t keep up with the level of actual cowardice and lunacy playing out in the real White House.

Team Trump had trumped the most absurd satire anyone could imagine.

I have no idea if “Succession’s” show-runner, Jesse Armstrong, a former “Veep” writer, has been able to work the Dominion and SmartMatic defamation suits — with all the astonishing, incriminating texts from Fox’s wretched/ethically debauched news “stars” — into this final season. But the dramatic-to-farcical possibilities of Fox’s current predicaments are endless.

Consider Murdoch/FoxNews’ current predicament. They are currently waiting for the presiding judge to decide on a summary judgment, a complete “Get Out of Jail Free” card on the basis of the First Amendment … or some mobius-like legal convolution. Should that fail they will almost certainly have to try to settle. But at what price?

It is inconceivable that Fox would take their case to trial. Not with what has already gone public and internationally viral in the the intra-company communications that haven’t been redacted.

So it would seem that Dominion and SmartMatic are in a, um, strong position to demand ample compensation, which even at 50% of what they’re demanding could easily push $2 billion. A penalty that would almost certainly and deservedly enrage Fox/NewsCorp shareholders into a massive class action suit. Which is not to mention encouraging all sorts of other characters — cops and guards injured in the Jan. 6 riot, staffers subjected to the usual FoxNews in-house misogyny and coercions — to file their own suits.

This already colossal clusterf**k has set off speculation that — very much like “Succession’s” Roy family — someone else must be sacrificed for the good of the next quarterly earnings. (And no, I don’t pity Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs.)

“Succession” is of course very much a bubble entity. Just as Fox has mentioned next to nothing about all the texts of Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity and others calling Trump an idiot and inferring that their devoted fans are clueless goobers hooked on bullshit. (I laughed so hard I wept at the e-mail from Carlson’s producer referring to their audience as a bunch “cousin f**kers.” That is so … so … “Succession”.)

The appeal, the dead-on, of-the-moment satire of the show is lost on MAGA nation. It simply doesn’t exist in their bubble. But that too is so of-this-moment. Two completely separate information/entertainment silos, with one capable of savoring a brilliant satire of a diseased reality and the other continuing to eagerly feed at a trough of prion-infused sewage.

I’ll have extra butter on my popcorn, thank you.