Lucy Prebble, the writer behind Succession and I Hate Suzie. Photo / Suzie Howell, The New York Times
With her best friend Billie Piper, she’s created a female Tony Soprano.
It’s hard to think of a less sympathetic cast of characters than the rampantly ambitious Roy dynasty in Succession, pursuing power and money while in real life the world faces financial adversity. The only person who rivals them for selfishness is I Hate Suzie’s Suzie Pickles, a former teenage pop star who is vain, chaotic and chronically unreliable. Yet somehow these characters are funny, compelling and on occasion even likeable.
“A lot of people found the first series of I Hate Suzie unbearable,” says Lucy Prebble, who created the hit black comedy and is also a writer on Succession. She grins mischievously. “You thought that was unbearable? Welcome back.”
Surely it couldn’t get any worse? The first series showed a woman in freefall. Suzie is played by Billie Piper, also a former teenage pop star and the show’s co-creator. After compromising photos of Suzie are posted online, she loses work, realises that she no longer loves her husband (which is fair, he’s odious) and becomes so unbearable that even her loyal agent quits.
The show was revolutionary in having a complicated lead woman who acts appallingly but you still root for. Prebble, 41, is proud of this. For years, starting out in theatre with the play Enron, then working in television, she felt she wasn’t allowed to write unsympathetic female characters. It wasn’t easy bringing Suzie to the screen — before Sky signed the show it was rejected by other channels who said they found her too unlikeable.
Piper and Prebble, who have been best friends since they worked on the ITV drama Secret Diary of a Call Girl in 2007, based much of it on their experiences, from fame and divorce (Piper divorced Chris Evans in 2007 and the self-styled “culture warrior” Laurence Fox in 2016) to anxiety (Prebble’s ex told her that this show is her passing on her neuroses to the rest of the world).
In the second series Suzie wants to restore her public image — so she does what all disgraced celebrities do and goes on a reality television show (called Dance Crazee). “That was Billie’s idea,” Prebble says. “She knows she’s a really good dancer, but I don’t think she wants to do Strictly so this was a way to dance.”
The show was made before Matt Hancock tried his luck on I’m a Celebrity . . . but Prebble has been reflecting on his appearance. “It’s the laundering of reputation — however much you are reviled, even if thousands of people have died as a result of your policies, if you are a bit self-deprecating and likeable the British public will find a way to go, ‘Oh you’re just a bloke.’”
She apologises for breaking off to finish her croissant — she’s just got off a flight from New York, where she lives for a third of the year while working on Succession. “There’s a mind-bending blurring between celebrity, politics and news and it speaks quite poorly to our political class. Look at Ed Balls presenting Good Morning Britain. He used to have a job repairing the economy. What’s the crossover between policies and light-hearted banter on TV? Is it fame he wants? Boris Johnson was the greatest example of someone whose success politically was often born out of media appearances and seemed better at playing a British politician than being one.”
The outlook is not all bleak — Prebble now feels able to write lines for women that she “wouldn’t have five years ago”. In this series Suzie’s former agent Naomi makes a joke about women voting against women on reality shows: “Why do women hate women so much? We are such stupid venal bitches.”
“I feel like we’re at a point where we’re able to recognise and laugh at the way women can be misogynistic to each other, as well as external misogyny,” Prebble says.
We groan at how shows with three-dimensional female leads are always compared to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s hot-mess comedy Fleabag, but Prebble says there is a reason for the comparison. “It suggests something before was wrong. I’m interested in exploring femininity in a way that has as much ambition and sophistication as the way that masculinity is dissected. Tony Soprano and Walter White from Breaking Bad are allowed to show their monstrous side and for decades films about masculinity have been a complex, layered exploration of conflicts and flaws while also telling a good story with brilliant acting.”
It’s easier to be original when writing about women too, “it’s a numbers game — we’ve seen fewer types of women on screen.” Still, she and Piper had to fight for one scene where Suzie is really bad. “It’s her Richard III moment. I think in terms of tragedies — a woman deserves a Richard III moment.”
In this series, Suzie is negotiating her divorce settlement and Prebble has captured that agony. “I’m at the age where a lot of people I know are going through divorces,” she says. “It’s natural to need to put the other person at a distance, but that’s harrowing when you’ve loved them. The struggle is you’ve got to co-operate to raise children when really you need to other your ex. I wanted to show how difficult it is to make the right decisions under so much pressure.”
Prebble and Piper went to Mallorca for two weeks to plan I Hate Suzie Too. Prebble was “suspicious about going away — I wondered if we’d actually do any work, but then I remembered that Life of Brian was written in Barbados and that is in my top three best films.”
Do they ever disagree? Prebble laughs. “Billie is much better at conflict than me. She has a clear sense of what she wants. I am a tyrant for dialogue; I like it to be heard. Billie is more emotionally sophisticated; she uses music where I wouldn’t. We resolve disagreements by rating how strongly we feel out of ten and the one who has the highest number gets their way.”
She wrote I Hate Suzie in New York, renting a hotel room to work in because it was cheaper than an office. It didn’t take her long to realise why it was so cheap — the traffic noise was constant. “Now when I think of the show that’s all I can hear,” she says. “The show has a stressful anxiety about it. I wrote it quicker than I’d have liked to because I had Succession too. So I had a bit of a breakdown and that all fed into it.”
Succession is back for a fourth series in 2023. Prebble is part of a team of about eight writers, including the creator, Jesse Armstrong. While “the buck doesn’t stop with me”, she has an influence. Gerri, for example, was originally meant to be a man and it’s thanks to Prebble that she is a woman. Prebble is proud to have written a lot of Roman and Gerri’s sexier scenes, which share an antic quality with I Hate Suzie.
“Succession is like being driven around in a lovely car with wonderful people,” she says. “It’s all very easy. I Hate Suzie is less safe. It’s British television so there’s a lower budget, harder schedule — everything is a nightmare.”
Why has a show about such ruthless ultra-high net worth individuals been such a hit? “It’s been a long time since a drama was that funny. Probably since the first series of The Sopranos. People are grateful for that. There’s something in the subject matter too. Succession is like painting in blues and greens — it’s grounded and funny. Suzie is more theatrical — if it was a colour it would be bright red.”
I Hate Suzie Too and Succession are both available to stream on Neon.
Written by: Susannah Butter
© The Times of London
Londoner Jennifer Abbott was known professionally as Sarah Steinberg.