Connor, the failson and outcast of the Roy family, quickly backtracks, amending the statement to, “I never got to make him proud.”

"Oh, man. He never even liked me," the dry-eyed failson says upon hearing the news.

Some elements of “Paradise” are dated, but the verve of “A Great Man’s Child,” the show’s failson anthem, with a lyric by Arnold Weinstein, still plays well alongside contemporary talk about “nepotism babies.”

When Kendall stood in front of a bank of cameras and implicated Logan's complicity in covering up sexual abuse and other crimes against humanity within Waystar Royco, he thought that for once he'd be seen not as a failson, but a whistleblower.

“A big part of the critique at the time is that he was sort of a failson that was a vehicle for these people,” said Josh Marshall, who chronicled the Bush years on his website, Talking Points Memo.