Succession – Season One: The Complete Scripts

Product Information

Collected here for the first time, the complete scripts of Succession: Season One, Season Two, and Season Three feature unseen extra material. Including deleted scenes, alternative dialogue, and character directions. They reveal a unique insight into the writing, creation and development of a TV sensation and a screen- writing masterpiece. Season One will include an exclusive introduction from creator and showrunner, Jesse Armstrong. Seasons Two, Three and Four will also include exclusive introductions by other screen writers on the show including ‘Executive Producer Frank Rich’ and ‘Executive Producer and writer Lucy Prebble’.

Seasons One, Two and Three will be out on 18 May with Season Four shortly following the end of that series. And in amongst it, just occasionally, you feel you get it right and the words make a spell. I remember just a couple of times being emotional as I wrote or rewrote. Once in Logan’s death episode, which came in a tumble, the long middle section barely revised after its first draft, when Shiv calls her dying or dead father “Daddy” — and then once in season two, rewriting the scene where Kendall tells Shiv he doesn’t know what he would be for if his dad didn’t need him. Armstrong’s breakthrough came with the prize-winning sitcom Peep Show (2003-2015), starring Robert Webb and David Mitchell, which he also co-wrote with Sam Bain. Photograph: Channel 4As Logan Roy prepares to sell Waystar Royco, Kendall, Shiv and Roman unite to build their own rival media empire. But an urgent call from Tom reveals Logan’s final curveball, throwing the siblings’ plans into jeopardy. Armstrong agrees: “That comic facility was very important to me. I feel reassured when even in the midst of tragedy there is a sort of comic ironic flavour to the turn of events.” Kendall Roy is dealing with fallout from his hostile takeover attempt of Waystar Royco and the heavy guilt from a fatal accident. Shiv stands poised to make her way into the upper-echelons of the company, which is causing complications for Tom, which is causing complications for Greg. Meanwhile, Roman is reacquainting himself with the business by starting at the bottom, as Connor prepares to launch an unlikely bid for president. He never directed an episode of Succession, mostly owing to a shortage of time. He says he would be interested in directing a feature film, but he prefers the time and space allowed by TV. “I like to be able to elaborate, rather than the crystalline thing of a movie, that you only get one shot at the idea and then you have to move on. Maybe it’s because I come out of sitcom, where you try to juice every drop out of every situation.” But of all the challenges and responsibilities of the years running the show, the question that weighed by far the heaviest was deciding when to draw it to a close.

In the brief respite since the fourth and final season of Succession reached its conclusion, the drama’s creator, Jesse Armstrong, has got used to fielding a banal question: what is he going to do next? Although he devoted seven years of his life to making one of the most critically acclaimed TV shows of the past decade, there is nonetheless an unthinking expectation that he should have another brilliant project up his sleeve, all ready to go. You sense that despite the monumental achievement and global recognition of Succession, sitcom remains his first love. “I’d love to work with Sam again,” he says of his sometime partner Bain. “I think we both would. It was not an unhappy Beatles breakup and we have some things cooking.” Yet the fact remained that up until Succession, Armstrong’s works that had made it into production were almost exclusively comedies. Now he was in charge of a big, ambitious satirical drama set in the US, with American characters and American situations, and he didn’t have Bain to share the burden. “It was a big learning process,” he says. “Unlike directing a movie, your duties as a showrunner are nowhere described. You write your own brief.” It’s all said in a thoughtful, moderate tone, in which it never sounds as if he’s taking himself too seriously. The paradox of Armstrong, the son of a Shropshire teacher, is that he is genial to fault but he has also written some of the most obscene comic lines of the 21st century.After HBO commissioned the series, he began writing the script for the pilot in a small flat in Brixton in the lead up to the Brexit referendum and the first cast read-through took place in New York on 8 November 2016 – the day Donald Trump was elected president. I loved the scripts,” recalls Frank Rich, the former New York Times drama critic, once known as the “Butcher of Broadway”, who in 2008 had just begun a consultancy role with HBO. He was particularly impressed by the Atwater screenplay because its profoundly American subject matter had been brought to life “in a very funny and mordant way by this Brit”.

Armstrong with Brian Cox during the filming of season two of Succession. Photograph: Zach Dilgard, HBO Prebble, a writer celebrated for her hit play Enron, had hopes of running her own show and initially she wasn’t overjoyed by the prospect of working under someone else. “I gloomily decided this was the beginning of the slippery slope down into being ‘meat in the room’,” Prebble says. “As you can see, I was an idiot. Once I read the pilot, I was bound to the show. I recognised the toxic family so completely and also knew a bit of the corporate American world it was exploring.” An ancillary benefit of keeping yourself out of the show is that what you thought you were transmitting is not necessarily what people will receive. And that’s a good thing. People are hungry, especially right now perhaps, for things that are other than what they seem — characters and situations that are allowed to be multiple. We all have an impulse to want to pull the mask off the baddie and have something simple revealed — base truths and clear explanations. But that first reducing, simplifying impulse will likely never wholly satisfy because it offends our deep sense of what the world is really like. Whether due to all this grist, or the aligning of the political planets (in)auspiciously, the pilot came unnervingly easily. Getting names in a script to feel real can be hard for me – they’re a tell-tale sign of whether I’m living inside it. Kendall, Shiv, Roman, Connor. They all felt right straight off the bat. Their inspirations, I suppose, were the children of these magnates: three of the Maxwell kids, the ones closest to the business (the boys, Ian and Kevin) and to their father (Ghislaine). Brent and Shari Redstone, with whom Sumner played a tough and complicated game of bait-and-switch over CBS-Paramount succession. And the Murdoch children, Prudence, Lachlan, James, Elisabeth, Chloe and Grace. My US agent was the first person I recall suggesting a totally different approach. A fictional family, a multi-series US show. For five years or so, I dismissed the idea, certain that a portrayal of a fictional family would never have the power of a real one. Four works changed my mind: HBO’s excellent Robert Durst documentary, The Jinx; Sumner Redstone’s grimly business-focused autobiography, A Passion to Win; James B Stewart’s propulsive DisneyWar; and Tom Bower’s fascinating Robert Maxwell biography Maxwell: The Final Verdict. These turned the idea of doing a media-family drama without a singular real-life model from a terrible betrayal of reality into a tantalising chance to harvest all the best stories. Here was an opportunity to explore all the most fascinating family dynamics within a propitiously balanced fictional hybrid media conglomerate. I took a long, deep dive into rich-family and media-business research. I talked about this, as-yet-unwritten, idea in half-ironised terms as ‘Festen-meets-Dallas’So once season three was complete and aired, in December 2021, I got my fellow executive-producer–writers together. Lucy Prebble, Tony Roche, Jon Brown, and Will Tracy joined me at my office in Brixton to look at the alternative future-season shapes I’d written up on the walls: one final season of ten episodes, or two of six or eight episodes. My sense was that we should do one last full-fat season rather than stretch it out. But I was wary of saying good-bye too fast to all the relationships and opportunities, of leaving creative money on the table, regretting all the subplots that would go unwritten, the jokes left untold. Succession is one of the most popular TV series in the last decade. Each season finale has led to an Emmy ® award for Best Screenwriting. In addition, the show has amassed eleven other Emmys, five Golden Globes and three BAFTAs.

I wonder if he is concerned that his perspective, particularly his comic social edge, might be affected by his own material success, which has completely removed the main preoccupation of most writers – the need to pay the bills. “I think you’ll have to wait and to see if maybe I’ll end up writing the next show from some very different angle,” he says, laughing again, but a little more nervously. “I hope not, but it’s something you can’t ignore.” The scripts of Succession have taken on a life of their own, with the published collections of Season 1-3 scripts shooting up to the top of the bestselling lists in the wake of the series finale on Sunday.He outlines his case in which he accepts that the streaming companies have taken a hit recently, but he maintains they are still highly profitable and those profits should be more favourably shared with the people who create their content and that writers should be protected from the threat of AI. I remember just a couple of times being emotional as I wrote or rewrote. Once in Logan’s death episode, which came in a tumble, the long middle section barely revised after its first draft, when Shiv calls her dying or dead father ‘Daddy.’”