While working as a political columnist at the New York Times in 2008 I took on an informal side gig as a creative consultant at HBO. The idea was to be part of a sounding board for Richard Plepler, who had become the company's co-CEO at a time when its signature hit shows were retiring and the cupboard of replacements was nearly bare. Among my first assignments was to read two feature-film scripts that Richard admired and had been languishing in network limbo, Murdoch and Atwater. Both were by the British writer Jesse Armstrong.
Their subjects were almost intimately familiar to me. More than three decades earlier, Rupert Murdoch, as yet unknown in America, had barged into the country's media culture by buying the New York Post, a cheeky liberal tabloid. The new proprietor shocked the newsroom and the city by quickly transforming it into a right-wing, pseudo-populist Fleet Street rag fixated on crime, celebrity, and cleavage. I was the Post's film critic, and, like many of my colleagues, soon fled, eventually ending up at the Times as drama critic for a dozen years before migrating to its editorial pages. By the time Richard brought me into HBO, being a Times columnist meant writing about Barack Obama, then on his improbable trajectory to the presidency. Obama's rise was improbable in large part because of the Republican party's long-standing 'Southern Strategy', an often-effective program of racial messaging dedicated to preventing anyone like Obama from gaining power. No one had been more ruthless in executing that strategy than Jesse's other real-life film subject, Lee Atwater, the Georgia-born political operative who manipulated white voters' fears to propel the first George Bush to the White House.
Jesse's page-turning scripts came with two surprises. The first was their dark comic tone: how could anyone find hilarity in the lives of arch-villains who had injected so many toxins into American discourse? Atwater was almost jubilant as it romped through the right-wing political history that would later prove to be the urtext of Trumpism. The second surprise was Jesse's provenance: How could a Brit know American politics and culture as acutely as our sharpest homegrown writers?
Such are the absurdities of Hollywood that neither Murdoch nor Atwater was ever made. But Jesse and I would cross paths in 2011, when he wrote his first and only episode of Veep, another quintessentially American show created by a British comedy writer (Armando Iannucci), and, in its first four seasons, written entirely by Brits (two of whom, Tony Roche and Georgia Pritchett, would join Jesse's mix of British and American writers at Succession). As I would repeatedly learn while producing Veep, brilliant outsiders see things that the natives don't. No matter that I grew up in Washington, DC and covered it as a journalist; it took Armando to make me see that its revered corridors of power have little resemblance to the glamorous West Wings built on Hollywood lots. Our sets were airless shitholes where the overflow of office detritus competed for space with the sour bureaucrats who generated it.
The intrinsic American-ness of Succession runs deeper than the concerted effort by everyone on the show, from writers to prop masters to production designers, to get such details right, whether of a supercilious black-tie Manhattan gala or a preposterous summit of Machiavellian media moguls at a faux-rustic luxury retreat where the participants are forced to dress down in mint sportswear while pretending to rough it. The Shakespearean contours of Logan Roy's Lear-esque patriarch notwithstanding, the central framework of Succession is a variation on the archetypal American saga in which a fierce, often immigrant striver builds an empire with nothing but his wits, only to be followed by feckless heirs, genealogical or otherwise, who either squander his legacy or destroy it. It's the story not just of legendary American media companies like Hearst and Henry Luce's Time Life, but Hollywood entertainment factories (MGM), not to mention Wall Street (Lehman), and organized crime (pick your Mafia family). If the younger Roys at times echo the behaviour of some of the Murdoch progeny in their self-delusional confidence in their own non-existent talents, their hapless public relations efforts to rebrand themselves, and their bottomless sense of entitlement, their father is an archetypal self-made American tycoon rather than a scion who inherited his empire as Rupert Murdoch did.
The primal connection between Succession and bedrock American mythos is one reason why the show resonates with an American audience that does not necessarily follow the Murdochs, the Redstones, Michael Eisner, John Malone, or other contemporary media and finance barons who sometimes inspired our show's fictional stories. That audience is more likely familiar with classic entertainments that offer variations on the theme, whether Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy or Lillian Hellman's frequently revived 1939 Broadway potboiler The Little Foxes, in which the vicious Southern siblings' ruthless civil war over the family inheritance drives a Black domestic servant to observe: 'There are people who eat earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it.'
Yet the more powerful connection between Succession and its viewership, whether in America, the UK, or beyond, is generated by the distinctive humor Jesse brings to his selfish, often despicable characters. One DNA strand of his biting, highly articulate form of comedy can be found in the pre-Veep British comedies in which he also collaborated with Armando on lampooning the absurdities of politicians - the film In the Loop and television's The Thick of It. Another strand can be found in the classic series Jesse created with Sam Bain, Peep Show, with its intimate chronicle of two man-boys who on occasion might suggest the 'disgusting brothers' of Succession, Tom and Greg, in embryo. In Succession, these strands intertwine. Jesse's comic muscle is exercised in both the characters' public-facing dramas as moguls and their personal dramas behind closed doors.
More than a few American viewers and television critics were at first baffled or put off by comedy infiltrating the corporate and family fisticuffs of Succession. As season one aired, the critical debate over whether Succession is a drama or a comedy was non-stop. It's a false question with no correct answer since good writing almost always encompasses both. (Comedy writers have a head start in checking both boxes because comedy, if often less respected, is harder to write than drama.) Another persistent and vexing critical question in the show's early going was why anyone should tune in weekly to watch a family of obscenely wealthy white assholes.
The second question is answered by the first. Most of the funniest lines emerge directly from the psyches of the odious (but far from brain-dead) characters themselves, not from a sarcastic observer (or omniscient scenarist) mocking them from the bleachers. The show is a human comedy, not a satire. With the exception of the outsider Greg, the characters are intentionally funny, not unintentionally funny. So you find yourself laughing with the Roys as well as at them, and once you are laughing with them, well, that's a gateway drug that can lead to crying with them too. You can get caught up in the Roys' dysfunctional family drama, in their grotesque ambitions, in their cruel schemes and public humiliations despite your disapproval of every last thing they do and stand for. The Roys may not be sympathetic, but neither are they stereotypes. They are intensely alive in every detail, both as written and acted. You don't have to be super-rich to share their base emotions, their intractable parental and sibling issues, or their ruptured marriages. By season two, most viewers seemed to have figured that out.
It would have been easy to do the network version of Succession (as others have before and after us) in which the villainous billionaires are squaring off against virtuous adversaries. But the would-be paragons of Succession are nearly as compromised as the Roys - most notably Gil, the Bernie Sanders-esque politician who's happy to make a self-interested side deal with the devil, and Nan Pierce, the doyenne of a legacy New York Times-CNN-ish media company who loathes all that Logan stands for but is not averse to betraying her own ostensible values if the price is right. At least the Roys have the courage of their own awful convictions.
Among the many exciting aspects of my six years-plus of working on Succession, none was more fascinating than to witness in real time how the Roys came to life through the show's creative process and continued to grow through four seasons. If the writing had been governed by a Manichean view of its characters, scripts would have been frozen before we shot anything. That was hardly the case. Episodes were rewritten constantly, with individual scenes fine-tuned on set, often between takes. This wasn't just a matter of perfectionism on the part of Jesse and the writers; it also reflected...
