The opening minutes of “La Maison,” a new follow-up drama on Apple TV+, offer a compelling portrayal of pride coming before a fall. Vincent Ledu (Lambert Wilson), the grizzled head of a Parisian fashion house that bears his name, is about to receive France’s highest civilian honor, but his mastery of his craft is waning: A rich Korean bride whose patronage he desperately needs proves resistant to his usual charms. After storming out of their meeting, he runs into his younger brother Victor (Pierre Deladonchamps), whom he banished from the firm years ago. “Vincent Ledu descends from Olympus to play salesman,” Victor says coolly. “Exactly,” Vincent replies. “And now I’m going back up.” He’s brought back down to earth a day later, when a video goes viral in which Vincent calls his difficult client and her entourage “dog-eating plebeians.” Although Vincent wishes to remain “decently silent,” he is not afforded that luxury, least of all by his family, who value the centuries-old Ledu brand as their ancestral birthright and cash cow. A stilted apology drafted by his PR team does little to ease the crisis. The fashion industry is no stranger to scandal or racism—as one observer put it, “Ledu just pulled a Galliano”—but Vincent’s transgression is immediately viewed as fatal. The company’s survival depends on whether the dynasty can expand its notion of family quickly enough to survive.

“La Maison” is more entertainment than art, but what entertainment it is. The ensemble soap is as bitchy and sly as you could hope for, full of bon mots and cheesy self-importance: Vincent’s spoiled thirtysomething nephew Robinson (Antoine Reinartz), a dwarf in the family but a prince in the studio, calls an underling named Céline by a different nickname because he refuses to pronounce the name of the rival brand. Perhaps more relevant to its appeal is that the series is gorgeous to watch—the first of Apple’s fashion-related projects to justify its extravagant budget. And yet, for all their excursions to the Swiss mountains or their private island (where Vincent and his siblings lounge around in their childhood castle, of course), the Ledus are the underdogs in this story. Her independence as a fashion house is threatened by Diane Rovel (Carole Bouquet), a luxury magnate who prides herself on being the richest woman in Europe but still thinks about what she doesn’t have. As the owner of an Arnault-like constellation of labels, she has been planning to add Ledu to her collection for decades and she senses this could be her chance.

Don’t mistake “La Maison” for an upper-class “Succession.” Rather than insisting on the stakes of its inheritance drama, the French series treats the conceit like a nasty game of musical chairs. It mattered who ran the Roys’ conservative media conglomerate; “La Maison,” to its credit, never makes the fate of a fashion house its subject in this way. Robinson compares his fate to that of “Diana, Fergie and Meghan” – whom he calls “my girls” – and the series’ pleasure lies in a kind of royal gawking that hews closer to the understated elegance of “The Crown” than the lurid fantasy of “Emily in Paris.” It’s also a relief that “La Maison” is intricate without being cynical, and free of the bleakness of its HBO predecessor. With the latter, you always felt that the family empire would collapse in an instant in the hands of the Roy children; Their father was right to withhold the keys to the kingdom from them. In contrast, there are likely multiple paths to reinventing Ledu.

Enter Paloma Castel (Zita Hanrot), an aspiring designer who joins the company to learn more about her father—the love of Vincent’s life—who died when she was two. (Happily, her origins are more complicated than they first appear.) The orphaned Paloma, who is the closest thing to Vincent’s own offspring, can, with some sensitivity, be worked into the family mythology (i.e., the rebranding campaign). And as Vincent’s second-in-command Perle (Amira Casar) matter-of-factly notes, Paloma is not only a talent of her generation, but also “a biracial activist… the essence of everything we need now.” Vincent bristles at her invocation of Wokism. His preferred candidate is Robinson, precisely because he is less threatening in the long run. Vincent believes he should wait out the cycle of outrage, and he can retake the throne after the current incumbent has disgraced himself. Never mind that Vincent has been repeating ideas for years – that the black robes that have become Ledu’s trademark might as well be shrouds.

Paloma is both Ledu’s safest bet and riskiest gamble; when she introduces her first handbag for the house, she finds that her exacting ethical standards actually attract greater scrutiny. Either way, she’s more of a mouthpiece for the debates rocking the industry—about diversity, sustainability, cancel culture—than a credible figure in her own right. Formerly the head of a Berlin-based label that traffics in unpolished designs and even less polished left-wing messages, Paloma is, frankly, an absurd choice to run high-end Ledu: her pants are sewn together from the scraps of other pants, her shirts from those of other shirts, and her ideals are no more original. She rails against luxury companies that stoke and exploit “the frustration of people who don’t have money”—and in the next breath declares an almost exclusive interest in haute couture.

Such a discrepancy reveals larger problems: For every knowing nod to a Dolce & Gabbana misstep or the fabled creation of the Birkin bag, there’s a detail that feels odd, especially when it comes to the characters of color. The Korean customer Vincent is angry at, for example, probably wouldn’t need a translator to converse with the fluent English-speaking designer; nor would it be surprising to an insider like Paloma that Ledu – like almost all major luxury houses – is sustained by the sale of handbags and perfume.

But if La Maison occasionally stumbles on the runway, it is a sure study in the cannibalization of the rich by their own people. That there are two fiefdoms involved—Rovel and Ledu—adds to the sense of glamorous disarray. The wavy-maned aristocratic Vincent, who looks like an even more dashing Yves Saint Laurent, is a howling lion killed by what he sees as a mere thorn in his paw; the nouveau riche Diane, rarely seen without her painfully heavy gold jewelry, is a tigress who is only slowly realizing that the daughter she slaps around for fun is growing up to be a predator to be reckoned with. The dysfunctional dynasties make for a fascinating contrast; each unhappy fashion house, it seems, is unhappy in its own way. While Vincent explicitly refuses to groom a successor—and stymies once-promising candidates like Robinson—Diane goes to the other extreme, pitting multiple potential heirs against each other so that only the most cold-blooded emerges victorious. The Rovel mogul’s baroque backstory embodies the series’ penchant for hackneyed melodrama, but the character emerges—thanks in part to Bouquet’s grounded performance—as a woman who has broken free of her own conventions and simply can’t respect anyone who can’t. Thus, Diane joins the pantheon of miserable parents in prestige dramas (and those seeking prestige), expressing her constant disappointment in her daughter while forcing her to compete against both her husband and her own child. Robinson’s self-sacrificing mother, meanwhile, is dismissed as “a woman who builds her own cage.”

Robinson himself is aware that, because of his closeness to his famous uncle, those around him rarely see him as more than a “chance” – and yet he can’t help but copy the cutting arrogance with which his older relatives have rebuked him throughout his life. His ambition to be a designer was snuffed out early, so the Ledu name is all he has going for him. Without the audacity to stand on his own two feet, his pedigree is probably not worth much. But a family pathology is also a kind of inheritance. ♦