Jeremy Strong, Sarah Snook and Kieran Culkin in a scene from the fourth season of Succession. Photo / HBO via AP
Jesse Armstrong and Lucy Prebble tell Andrew O’Hagan about crafting the satire of the century.
Andrew O’Hagan: For the past 10 years, probably the most important show that has appeared on television has been Succession: beautifully written, beautifully acted, beautifully conceived, and endlessly inquiring about the nature of the world that we’re living in - and that great sort of disaster that has been the media’s influence in our everyday lives. It’s a moral inquiry. Was it a political show from the beginning?
Lucy Prebble: One of the things that we’ve learned over time, if you look at what came in over the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, is that news programming - at Fox, for example - has had a greater impact on the polarisation of America than almost anything else. And so it’s impossible to write a story about a family that manages a business similar to that without being political.
Jesse Armstrong: Initially, there was an idea for a documentary, which was very much about Rupert Murdoch and his actual family. That idea went away, 15 years ago, as one of those many projects that just don’t get made in film and TV. And then when Sam Bain and I had finished writing our sitcom Peep Show, I was thinking about the next thing. I read quite a lot about Sumner Redstone, and quite a bit about Robert Maxwell. It made me think you’d have this tremendous freedom if you weren’t writing about these people - once you broaden the canvas, you think about the similarities between emperors, kings, princes, princesses, and myth and fiction. It became very exciting to come up with a fictional world.
LP: You’re also wrangling the characters in different ways. I remember a conversation we had in the first season, in which I said something that seems so naive: “Look, Jesse, shouldn’t one of the kids have a good vision for the company? Even if they can’t do it? Shouldn’t one of them have been the character who’s heroically going, ‘No, we should be doing good in the world’?” And I remember Jesse saying no. That was such a good turning point, because a lot of shows would have done that. Kendall Roy is quite an un-American character: sort of useless, empty, not really having the heroic journey that you expect. And I think, luckily for us, we came upon a cultural time in America where people began to recognise that in positions of power.
JA: There are probably a number of times where we do have characters express - I think probably where they’re not telling themselves the complete truth, but where they do find it very useful - a different vision of the future of the company and what they believe about it. And that recognises that we all want to make ourselves a hero in our story and believe what we’re going to do has some kind of moral impulse. It’s really important to remember that even when characters have got this amoral cause.
LP: By the third season, I remember somebody saying in the room: “But Shiv was a Democrat, shouldn’t she be sort of innately a bit better?” And I was like, no - the reason she’s a Democrat is complicated, but it’s not because she’s better.
AOH: A definition of English satire has been that it’s the place where the classical meets the topical. And you must have felt this, the sharp end, because didn’t you start filming the day after Trump was elected? You often hear the phrase something is “beyond satire”. Did you feel that it was almost beyond satire, these media relationships, the politicians, who were active during the time you were making this?
JA: We did the read-through for the pilot the day of Trump triumphing over Hillary Clinton. Sometimes you think of what Tom Lehrer said - how satire died when Kissinger was given the Nobel Peace Prize - and people can feel that even more now, especially when it was Boris Johnson and Trump. They’re so sort of gross and cartoony. And is it impossible to get an angle on those people from a satirical point of view? But I think we always felt there were so many targets here. It never felt like a limiting factor. It was useful for us to have a gauze from reality, but we were feeding on it. We’d often take a story and go, “Can we fit this in?” It would be good raw material and we’d change it, hopefully beyond recognition. Once, we tried to take a story from DisneyWar, a great book by James B. Stewart about the Michael Eisner era. There was a story of a Disney executive holding a departmental meeting and asking, “Tell me, what is your dream job?” The director of finance said, “You know, what I really want to get into is marketing and that’s where I see my future being.” And he ended the meeting saying, “Right, you’re fired. I only want people who love the job they’re in.” We wrote two versions of that scene, shot them with Matthew Macfadyen, and it was too vivid when you watched it. You thought, “This would never happen - no one could be so inhuman.” It’s often those things that were really close to reality where you think, “No one would do that.”
AOH: How important was it that this was a family drama?
LP: I think it was essential to its success, because everybody comes from a family. It’s a cliche, but true. Even if you’re repelled or confused by the world of billionaires, or people running a huge media corporation, you’re not confused by what it feels like to be the second-born in a family, where you feel overlooked, or have parents who got divorced and don’t get on. I think with American drama, particularly, the family is this centre, whether you’re talking about The Sopranos, The Simpsons or Arthur Miller.
AOH: Did you realise, from the very beginning, the relationships between the siblings would be utterly dominated by the notion not only of succession, but of the relationship with their father, and that the father’s relationship with them individually was going to be a series of multiple fictions? It almost seems to me that he’s lying to each of them, and lying to the others about the others.
JA: I think the only thing I really knew about, when I started comparing the Murdoch family to all these other families, is that unbelievable attraction of that sun in your life, which is often this patriarchal figure. And it is heat, it’s money, it’s power, but it’s also interest, gossip, lots of rather less grand things, but equally attractive, which make it unbelievably difficult to make yourself into a human being separate from it, because you’re being warmed by this sun, but burned by it. It’s the idea of coming into a room, and everybody knowing your name, in that regal, and also, you know, robber-baron way - all the family names, of the Fords down to the Carnegies and the present day: that crushing weight that you get, and the implication that their relationship to the centre is going to always be the centrifugal force of the show.
AOH: One of the things that novelists face all the time is that question of: Is it plausible that somebody can be this rank, that somebody can behave this badly towards somebody they profess to love?
JA: Ambivalence is always very interesting in a show and a movie. And the weird thing that often happens during development of movies and TV shows is that ambivalence gets steamrollered out. We have this sort of manic desire for logic. But audiences know that parents who love their children also f*** them up. And kids who love their parents also hate them, you know? Being able to write to the extremities of both of those is really very interesting.
LP: I don’t mean to sound bleak, but I think that the capacity that people have to hurt other people that they love is enormous. And that doesn’t apply to rich people more than anyone else.
AOH: To bring Philip Larkin into the picture, do “they f*** you up, your mum and dad”? What’s Logan Roy doing to his children in the show?
JA: It may have a certain element of sociopathy - he only looks forward. He has a strong desire, like a pharaoh or a king, to have these monuments, and live forever - and they can be human monuments. So he loves the idea of succession, because that’s carrying on, isn’t it? But as soon as he hands the sceptre to someone else, they suddenly become like the Grim Reaper to him, and they embody his own demise. And so he has that complicated relationship, I think, of desperately wanting to transcend, but also finding it terrifying to think of his own mortality.
LP: There’s that idea of somebody who was brought up without very much, then they make a lot of money and have children who are given a lot. There’s often a resentment there that they can never quite sort of work through. He’s furious that his children are pale and weak and haven’t had to do what he had to do. And yet he’s the one that has given them all of this privilege. And that’s just an irony they really can’t ever work through.
AOH: In the whole history of political satire, one great area of importance has always been the secondary character. And absolutely crucial here, in terms of Succession, are Tom, the courtier, and Greg, this gormless character.
JA: One of the funny things about Greg and Tom is that, essentially, they’re robots, in that their being is completely defined by their relationship to power. They think they have psychological impulses, but they’re just completely materialistic: they salute up and they punch down. And that’s pretty much it. I think for an audience, seeing through someone who’s pretending to be a full human being is quite thrilling and persuasive about a certain kind of person.
AOH: Kurt Vonnegut once said that the only person who benefited from Dresden was him. Is there a sense in which only writers and filmmakers can benefit in any real sense from the disasters surrounding us?
LP: There’s something inherently difficult about even talking about this “golden age” of television. You know, another word for a golden age is a financial bubble - the fact that there’s been so much terrific television is because there’s this huge financial bubble that is now contracting and bursting. We’re going to look back at some of the most expensive examples of prestigious television and be like, “Wow, do you remember when they could do that?” It’s a bit like when you walk around cathedrals now and you might think, “Oh my God, they spent it on this.”
This is an edited transcript of a conversation at the Charleston Festival on May 27; Succession – The Scripts is published by Faber & Faber.
Film distributor A24 used this to promote Celine Song's 'Materialists'.