Exclusive: ‘Succession’ creator Jesse Armstrong on cooking up a classic & what comes next

Succession

Succession creator Jesse Armstrong reflects on his HBO epic with Richard Middleton, dissecting his creative process and explaining why he wouldn’t change a thing about the show or its ending.

Jesse Armstrong is the scripted world’s hottest property right now. And he’s happy doing absolutely nothing about it.

It is understandable: the Succession creator tells TBI he had “constant anxiety of screwing the show up” and “infecting” the rest of the series as it reached its climax earlier this year, which, given its name, would have been somewhat detrimental to its legacy.

Instead, Armstrong completed one of the toughest tasks in scripted TV – he landed a critically acclaimed show and managed to avoid upsetting too many people in the process.

And breath…

Succession wrapped its fourth and final season in May on HBO following a stellar run that tracked the life of media mogul Logan Roy and his attempts to find a worthy successor to his media empire, Waystar RoyCo.

Talking to Armstrong, it becomes clear just how all-consuming the show was – only now is he able to reflect on what has been achieved. It is also clear that he is a thinker, with pauses to collect his thoughts before delivering succinct nuggets that provide insights into his writing process but also the scripted industry as a whole.

The story of how Succession came to being is now well-known, originating as a docudrama in which a fictional character based on real-life mogul Rupert Murdoch would deliver straight-to-camera insights into his business secrets. That was more than 15 years ago, with the intervening years allowing the idea to evolve into a fictional scripted series that mirrored elements of Murdoch and other media bigwigs’ lives.

But it was life before that on shows such as Channel 4’s slow burning comedy Peep Show and films including Chris Morris’s Four Lions that provided Armstrong with his skills to deliver Succession.

“From Peep Show into Succession, I got sort of everything and nothing – they are really different shows, I wrote Peep Show with my writing partner, Sam Bain, so it was very much a collaboration. But sitcoms are in my bones and I learned storytelling on it, we paid quite a lot of attention to that even though it was a half-hour sitcom. That’s where I learned how to write really and we did nine seasons of it.

“And, you know, most of what I came to rely on in Succession was storytelling that I’d learned with Sam on Peep Show. There’s a way of looking at Succession as a comedy or even a sitcom – perhaps that doesn’t tell the whole story, but it’s not an unprofitable way of thinking about it.”

L-R: Richard Middleton & Jesse Armstrong

Creative process

While Succession was not based on Murdoch directly, Armstrong used biographies on the Fox founder – as well as books on Sumner Redstone, Robert Maxwell, Conrad Black and Tiny Roland – to research copiously and to create the rich worlds in which the Roys live. Yet despite the myriad links between the TV industry and those moguls, Armstrong says he didn’t talk to “many people face to face” and being removed from his subject matter was important.

“I found it quite useful to be British writing about America and having that distance. When I occasionally have met powerful people in the media or elsewhere, you get such a strong sense of them and their personality that it can almost be distorting in that you feel that you’ve had insights that aren’t there.

“There’s just a feeling from meeting this influential person like you’re on the inside and it does nothing necessarily for what you write. Maybe you can use that feeling, but people don’t need to know who, personally, these people are, and you don’t need to chase down that lunch with the person on the inside of it.

“Read the books, read the articles, it’s all in there – most of the best stories are in those secondary sources.”

And, Armstrong admits, he encourages writers to steal – “you know, not to steal other people’s scripts, but to steal from life. Those biographies are rich in specific detail and they’re rich in character dynamics. And you then will find that your material metamorphosises is in your hands into something completely new.

“You take a story from there and a story from their family dynamic that you know, from your own relationship with family, then a bit of mythology, a bit of history and suddenly you have a really rich brew that’s mostly stolen. And then, hopefully, you’re the crucible in which it all gets boiled up together.”

Getting the consistency

The industry is in many ways unrecognisable from the one that saw Succession commissioned to pilot in 2016. Two things are current however: HBO’s Casey Bloys and Donald Trump.

Bloys, who has since risen to become chairman & CEO at HBO and Max, “trusted” in Armstrong, partly because of his work on fellow HBO show Veep, so while “it wasn’t a big swing, it was still a swing”. Trump, meanwhile, was elected on the day that the read-through for the pilot took place.

“We had this auspicious start, feeling like we were right in the middle of the culture. And up until that point, the only other writer who had been involved with it was my colleague, Simon Blackwell.” After that, Armstrong brought a writers room together and the ship sailed off, helmed by a captain who says he “made it up as he went along.”

“You know, it’s extraordinary when I speak to fellow showrunners, because there is no one way of doing it. There’s no manual, really the job can stretch to whatever you want it to be in America, you’re given a lot of latitude.”

Yet Armstrong’s self-deprecation seems to hide a man who knew exactly what he wanted but was willing to give his writing team the freedom to create this complex world.

“I was willing to let people come in, even if they were only going to be there a couple of days each week,” he says. Some joined via Zoom, with five or six writers working some days and 10 or 11 on others. I did relatively short days, from maybe 10am until 3pm or something like that, partly because there’s a limit to how long you can be really concentrated and focused.

Most of what I came to rely on in Succession was storytelling that I’d learned with Sam Bain on Peep Show. There’s a way of looking at Succession as a comedy

“And also that gave me time. You have someone in the room taking notes, keeping a record of what’s said, so it would give me time at the end of the day to go to my office and look over what we’ve done the previous day.”

Armstrong says his process remained fairly consistent across the show’s four-season run, with the first four weeks or so being “really very open”.

“We don’t need to worry about what’s in an episode. You could pitch a really silly story for Greg or you could pitch a very heart-rending piece of backstory that we wouldn’t know if it would make it into the show.

“But we would talk about it and anything’s allowed in that time. A lot of character talk, a lot of backstory talk and a lot of ‘general shape’ talk. By the end of those four weeks, you would hope to have the season arc sketched out and then you can go through and spend a week on each individual episode, breaking them down.”

Scripts would tend to go through 40 drafts and Armstrong says there were “almost no notes” from HBO, until the end of the process.

“I would have already pitched them the arc of the season though and I do that in some detail. I remember Jane Tranter, who was an executive producer on the show, came in during the very first season that we did, before I pitched the season [to execs].

“I did it in a slightly British, maybe ramshackle kind of way, saying ‘maybe this will happen, maybe that’s going to happen here,” Armstrong says. “She took me aside and said look, you know, I think this is working, but work on that pitch like this is the first time they’re going to hear the season.

“If they have a good reaction, the next six months of your life are going to be a lot easier.” Such an approach, he adds, is key. “Just remember that you’re putting capital in the bank of trust.”

Succession

Day-to-day & next moves

On set, Armstrong says he would often interact directly with actors if they wanted to, assuming the episode’s director was comfortable with that. “And obviously, outside of the production and the director sphere, I’m talking to the actors a lot.”

But what about the varying approaches to acting, particularly those taken by method actor Jeremy Strong (who plays Kendall Roy) and Brian Cox, who plays his father?

“There has been a little bit of crackle about that but it wasn’t a big part of daily life,” he says. “They prepare in different ways but what it came down to was a preference for a little bit more rehearsal versus a little bit less. Honestly, often, they were in the same space about how much preparation they wanted to do for a specific scene. So that wasn’t a big challenge in my showrunning life.”

Fast-forward to today and the industry in a state of increasing flux with Bloys and other US studio execs tightening spending, would Succession even get made?

“I’m not a good industry analyst type so I don’t know, but the enthusiasm is there for quality shows. Succession probably had an outsized reaction because it was set in the media world. In the context of the US population, it had a smaller number of viewers on nights it went out, but on catch up and so on you’re looking at more like 8-10 million people watching it.

“Peep Show also had small numbers at the time but now they would be considered very good numbers for a UK sitcom. And I do think that Succession – and this was not a consideration at all for us – will continue to make money for people because it is a good show. It is solid, the plots for each episode were thought out and people can continue to watch it. And people will continue to think about that. If you make something really solid, its life can be long.”

The next move for Armstrong remains to be seen; there are ideas percolating, but like most writers in the US, he has been striking until September.

“I haven’t had the time or, to be honest, the inclination to chat about the show too much [until recently]. But I feel happier discussing it now because it is in the rear view mirror. I’m not picking apart the body of an athlete while it’s still trying to run a race.”

So are the characters that populated Succession still in his head when he wakes up each morning?

“Very occasionally, sometimes I see a news story and I think that’s a great bit of stuff that we could have used as the kernel of a story. But that is massively outweighed by the relief that I don’t have to break that story, to think about how it works and keep on at it for months before realising that it won’t fit into an episode and discard it.”

Perhaps, given this, it’s no surprise that he wants to leave his Logan Roy-led production alone.

“No, [I wouldn’t change anything] and that’s not in an arrogant way, but I was so worried. The state of showrunning is constant anxiety of screwing it up, that what you’ve done so far is OK but the next episode might fail and won’t be coherent or true, or real. It will in some way retrospectively infect everything you’ve done before and make it seem shit.

“The anxiety was constant through every season and there was a fear that it would be the next hurdle where we would fail, which is why there were so many drafts and attempts to make sure we got there, to make it good. That anxiety is particularly acute towards the end.

“I wouldn’t want to fuck with any of the component parts because the whole cake seemed to be edible. I don’t want to start throwing an extra egg in now.”