The most accurate market research on the prestige TV wellness economy wasn’t published by McKinsey or Goldman Sachs. It aired on HBO and Showtime. Succession, Billions, and The White Lotus each decoded a different dimension of how the ultra-wealthy relate to their bodies, their mortality, and the industries that monetize both. Watch them back-to-back and you have a three-part documentary on the longevity economy.
Succession: Wellness as Power Infrastructure
The Roys didn’t do wellness for health. They did it for control. Logan Roy’s physical decline across four seasons wasn’t just a plot device. It was the show’s central thesis: that health is the ultimate power asset, and its loss is the only form of vulnerability wealth cannot hedge.
The show captured what the concierge medicine industry already knows. When you’re worth billions, your health isn’t personal. It’s corporate infrastructure. Logan’s private physicians, the whispered concerns about his capacity, the medical crises that reshuffled succession dynamics, all of it mirrored the real-world phenomenon of key-person health risk that drives executive health assessment spending.
The show’s wellness moments were deliberately unglamorous. No biohacking. No green juice. Just the raw anxiety of aging bodies trying to maintain power. That grimness was the point. For the Roys, wellness wasn’t an aspiration. It was damage control.
Billions: Biohacking as Alpha
Bobby Axelrod and Mike Prince approached wellness the way they approached markets: as an optimization problem with a measurable return. Billions was the first major show to portray biohacking, performance coaching, and wellness optimization as tools of competitive advantage rather than lifestyle choices.
The show’s performance coach character, Wendy Rhoades, represented the psychological dimension of the wellness economy. Her role blurred the lines between therapist, executive coach, and performance optimizer, exactly the hybrid role that’s emerged in real-world longevity practices and elite wellness programs.
The hedge fund setting mattered. Finance professionals were the earliest adopters of biohacking culture: the nootropics, the cold plunges, the obsessive biomarker tracking that’s now mainstream. Ben Greenfield and Dave Asprey built their audiences partly on Wall Street’s appetite for cognitive enhancement. Billions dramatized that appetite before most viewers had heard the word “nootropic.”
The White Lotus: Wellness as Class Performance
If Succession showed wellness as power and Billions showed wellness as performance, The White Lotus revealed wellness as theater. The show’s resort settings, the spa treatments, the yoga sessions, the carefully curated relaxation, all functioned as satire of wellness consumption as a class marker.
Season two’s Sicily setting amplified the critique. Wealthy guests consumed wellness experiences (massages, excursions, elaborate dining) without any actual transformation. The wellness was decorative. The dysfunction was structural. It was the most honest portrayal of luxury wellness retreats ever broadcast: beautiful facilities, premium pricing, and clients who leave exactly as broken as they arrived.
The show also captured the old money wellness spending dynamic with precision. The characters didn’t discuss what things cost. They simply consumed. The invisibility of the price tag was the ultimate status signal, exactly the dynamic that drives the Hamptons wellness economy and the luxury medspa circuit.
What the Shows Got Right
Taken together, these three shows predicted several real trends before they reached mainstream awareness. Health as a material business risk, now reflected in the growth of executive health assessments and key-person insurance requirements. Biohacking as mainstream professional culture, now a $29 billion industry. Wellness spending as social signaling, now visible in the VO2 max status symbol phenomenon. And the fundamental tension between wellness consumption and genuine health transformation, which the wellness grift spectrum explores in detail.
Prestige television didn’t just reflect the longevity economy. It provided the cultural permission for wealthy viewers to see themselves in these dynamics, and to start spending accordingly. The shows were the market research. The $25 billion medspa economy and $190 billion supplement industry are the market response.
The Next Season
The next wave of prestige TV wellness content will likely center on the longevity industry directly. The characters are already written: the tech billionaire spending $2 million a year trying not to die (Bryan Johnson). The physician who became a supplement mogul (Mark Hyman). The biohacker living off-grid in Idaho while making millions online (Ben Greenfield). The fitness creator who built and sold a $400 million app (Kayla Itsines).
Hollywood doesn’t need to fictionalize the wellness economy. The real stories are already stranger than anything a writers’ room could produce.