Succession, the inside story: could a few scruffy Brits write a glossy, high-end New York drama? Yes and no
The pilot for Succession was filmed in New York in November 2016, just as Donald Trump was elected president. I was across the country in Los Angeles, filming an episode of Veep called Georgia, about the first “free” democratic elections in the former Soviet republic where the opposition wins more votes than there are people. As we filmed our fictional characters listening to the results in disbelief, I stood in my “I’m with her” T-shirt, listening to the real results in disbelief.
A couple of months later, I was prised out of my bottomless pit of despair (and my house) when Jesse Armstrong, who I’d worked with on various comedy shows in the past, asked me to be on the writing team for his new series, which HBO had commissioned.
Armstrong’s original writing team for Succession consisted for the most part of British comedy writers. There was doubt felt in some quarters as to whether this group of scruffy Brits could pull off a glossy, high-end New York drama. And in many ways we couldn’t. After we handed in the scripts for the first few episodes of season one, HBO hastily employed a superrich consultant, whose job was to explain what it was like to be a billionaire to a group of people who were thrilled that someone was paying for their Pret sandwich.
Rich people don’t wear coats, we were told. Their shoes only ever touch carpet, as they move seamlessly from their cars to their jets to their buildings.
Also, crucially, they don’t duck (when getting out of helicopters).
In the first season, I wrote an episode set around Thanksgiving. The rich consultant really went to town on me. I had written a line for Logan’s wife, Marcia, announcing that lunch was ready. But rich people don’t make food-related announcements, apparently. They don’t even know where their kitchens are and they definitely don’t say “Who’s for more sprouts?”, while spooning them on to people’s plates.
I wrote another draft accordingly. This just enraged the rich consultant further. “Where on earth did you get the idea that there would be maids in maid uniforms?”
I racked my brains. From Tom and Jerry episodes (or pornography) did not seem like a good answer.
Apparently, rich people have handsome young men in chinos and polo shirts serving them. There’s an agency and everything. And don’t even get me started on what he thought about my mention of a napkin ring. Let’s just say, Logan Roy would have blushed at the language he used.
Writers’ rooms are a strange mixture of group therapy, snacking and confession. You share ideas but also secrets and fears and humiliations in the hope that it might unlock some character or a moment in the show. We would start the day by recounting what we had done and what we had eaten the night before. These accounts ranged from long, exotic anecdotes about going to a star-studded party because the writer in question was godfather to Yoko Ono’s dog (one of the Americans) to the rather more brief “Nothing. Potato” (from one of the British writers).
We wrote the first season in the belief that nobody would watch the show. And nobody did, really. Or the second season. It took a global pandemic, and the world’s population sitting at home wondering what they could do, for people to really start paying attention.
By the time it came to write the final season, we knew people were watching. When we planned the episodes, we didn’t dare write “Logan dies” on the wall in case somebody saw it and leaked it to the press. Instead, we used a codeword: Larry David. Episode three looked like a fun episode – Connor’s wedding, Larry David.
Once the scripts are written, it would take nine months to film a season of Succession. That’s nine months of early starts and freezing days and night shoots. Hours and hours of waiting. Jeremy Strong, Kieran Culkin and Sarah Snook alone could almost field a Succession Babies football team with the children they have had since the pilot.
The great thing about Armstrong’s creation is that every character deserves a spin-off. They each warrant more exploration and could hold our attention. Who wouldn’t want to watch a season of Colin? Or Stewy? Or Gerri and Roman? But I suspect that will not happen.
The final season was a sad and sobering one to write. I think Armstrong and the writers felt compelled to deliver on “the promise of the premise”. The idea of someone taking over is implicit in the title. It would be wrong not to explore that. By a quirk of fate, when Larry David Larry David-ed – and his children started fighting for the crown on our screens – it was just as, back here in Britain, we were watching King Charles juggling the esoteric medieval paraphernalia of his coronation as he took over the family firm.
Logan Roy was never comfortable with the idea of anybody succeeding him, even a natural heir. Directors of some companies use a “poison pill” as a defence strategy to stop people from acquiring or taking control of their company. In Logan’s case, this was not necessary as he had effectively planted a “poison pill” in the DNA of his children. If only they could stick together, if only they could trust one another, they could win. But their father’s legacy means that they cannot stick together and they cannot trust each other.
In the final weeks of filming, there was a palpable sense of loss, almost grief, on set. The cast and crew all felt that they had been part of something special and were sad to see it end. And anxious about the future.
And we had come full circle. A deeply troubling presidential election – in the background while we filmed the pilot – came centre-stage in the final few episodes of the show. Logan’s legacy, the dangerous delusions of rightwing media, was shown to be toxic and far-reaching. Of far more importance than a fistfight between two spoiled boys. And now, another troubling election in 2024 looms.
Georgia Pritchett is a writer and coexecutive producer on Succession. She has also written for shows such as Veep, The Thick Of It, Miranda, The Shrink Next Door and Smack the Pony
of personal and social transformation”. Although never explicitly stated, the letter’s message is clear: Taylor Swift needs to dump MattyHealy in the name of racial justice.
If you’re not well-versed in the intensity and politics of stan Twitter – “stan” is internet lingo for fan, by way of the Eminem song from 2000 –this will probably read as massive, incomprehensible overreach: an example of people acting in a bizarrely paternalistic and proprietorial way over a star whom they supposedly love. If you dofollow stan Twitter with any regularity, you know that this behaviour now passes for business as usual.
The star/fan dynamic has almost inverted in recent years: many musicians now take their cues from social media. To some degree, pandering to your core base is a necessity of the job – even the most omnipresent star can no longer assume that they have a captive audience whose attention won’t be directed elsewhere when they’re about to release something new.
Fans increasingly expect their desires to be serviced constantly, and retaliate fiercely when the art or the artist doesn’t fit into their own idea of how someone’s career should be progressing. Policing musicians’ relationships is the natural next step for young fans who have grown up with the expectation that stars have to have good politics, and whose parasocial relationships with artists were stoked during pandemic years, when artist engagement on platforms such as TikTok went into overdrive.
Swift does take certain cues from her fanbase – just last week she released an extendedversion of a Lana Del Rey collaboration as per her fans’ wishes. So the #SpeakUpNow letter, for a certain kind of person, probably seems like a totally normal interaction with a celebrity – despite it being exactly the kind of intrusive, judgmental behaviour that so many fans purport to defend their favourite stars from. Neither Swift, nor Healy, has commented on the letter.
By way of admission: I can relate to how lots of fans are responding to the stars’ relationship. I used to be thatkind of fan, thinking that an intense devotion to someone’s art should translate into some level of input on their day-to-day life. In 2018, when I was 20, I wrote an opinion piece criticising the musician Grimes’s relationship with Elon Musk, arguing that it was in direct opposition to her political leanings. At the time, what Grimes had done really felt like a betrayal; I thought that relationships and politics should fit in together neatly, like pieces of a puzzle, a misconception I would like to attribute to my age.
So I don’t blame some fans for having that worldview: a lot of the people who spend hours online posting about their favourite artists are extremely young – younger than you would expect. But I’m also certain that a lot of people should know better, at this point, than to make demands – or threats – over who a pop star chooses to date. While Swift’s music may be fans’ business, her life needs to remain her own.
Shaad D’Souza is a freelance culture journalist
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