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.
“I mean,” he says, “I’ve got a few ideas but I’m really trying to enjoy the feeling of living a more normal life where every set of emails isn’t a mad triage of what is going to immediately explode.”
One thread of Succession, he says on a Zoom call from his book-lined study in south London, was the exploration of how a highly driven man seeks to thwart mortality through the accumulation of power, wealth and influence. In this respect, Logan Roy, the patriarch of the drama, was only following in the footsteps of the real-life media moguls such as Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone who inspired his creation.
Armstrong, 52, acknowledges that in a similar vein the pressing concerns that came with putting out each episode of Succession didn’t allow much time for morbid reflection. However, he’s determined to take his foot off the accelerator and let his mind “noodle away rather than running into the next thing”.
In any case, he adds: “We’re all on strike.” It’s said half-jokingly, but he’s genuine in his support for the writers’ strike that has brought Hollywood to a standstill. It’s been claimed that Armstrong came to earn about $1m an episode on Succession and he’s well aware of what he calls his “lucky position in the showrunner class”. “But it’s about people making their way in the industry in the future,” he says. “My fellow writers working on shows . . . where the median salary is going down.”
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.
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.
It seems to be a rule of a certain kind of British comedy that people from solid conventional backgrounds produce the most savage humour. Chris Morris, the satirist behind Brass Eye, had a GP father, grew up in a Cambridgeshire village and studied zoology at university. Armando Iannucci, who created The Thick of It, considered becoming a priest in his teens and began a doctorate on John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Armstrong has worked with and been influenced by both men. Unlike Iannucci, who still has a priestly gravity about him, he is full of laughter and self-deprecating quips. When the image and sound keep freezing on our computer screens, he asks that I “fill in the gaps with better vocabulary – make me more erudite”.
Although he views himself as a satirical writer, he says he doesn’t go in for “Swiftian disgust”. Instead, he feels “a tenderness towards humanity”, a recognition of what “a fucking mess we make continually, despite our best intentions”.
Tender is not necessarily the first word you’d reach for when describing Succession, the story of a ruthless media entrepreneur and the battle of his rivalrous children to supplant him. But lurking behind the characters’ combative exteriors was a revealing sense of vulnerability. He first pitched the idea for the show back in early 2016 with the sales line of “Dallas meets Festen” – something that would combine the glossy high-powered world of billionaires with the guerrilla style and irreverence of the Danish Dogme school of film-making.
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.
While neither of those events was referred to explicitly in the show, there was a potent sense of disruption in its depiction of politics and big business. Armstrong is a political writer, insofar as he’s interested in the wider context of social dynamics, but there are no lectures to be found in his work.
An early job after university was working as researcher for the Labour MP Doug Henderson. Armstrong says that witnessing the discrepancy between presentation and ideals in politics, and the playing out of “quite normal human vanity and ambition”, made a lasting impression on him. “I was a lowly, footsoldiery, researchery minion,” he says, “but being in that relationship to power tells you a huge amount about hierarchies and power.”
In the hierarchy of film and television, the role of writer is usually not that elevated. A notable exception in the US is when the writer is also the showrunner, a role for which there is no real equivalent in the UK, combining as it does aspects of creator, writer, producer and director. Suffice to say it carries near limitless creative responsibilities.
By his own reckoning, Armstrong had only produced “one hour of filmed television drama as a solo writer” (an episode of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror), before HBO made him showrunner on Succession. While factually true, that summary of his career doesn’t begin to tell the whole story. The co-creator and co-writer with Sam Bain of Peep Show, the prize-winning Channel 4 sitcom that ran for nine seasons, as well Fresh Meat (four seasons), Armstrong had also written for Iannucci’s The Thick of It and its American cousin Veep, as well as being one of the writers (again with Bain) of Morris’s black comedy feature film Four Lions.
That backlist might have been enough to get him into meetings with HBO but perhaps more influential was Hollywood’s “blacklist”, a collection of the best screenplays that have not made it to film, on which two Armstrong scripts appeared back in the 00s. One focused on the character of Murdoch and the other was about Lee Atwater, a rightwing American political strategist who advised presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr.
“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”.
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.”
He also selected his own Anglo-American writing team that worked out of London offices, first in Brixton and later in Victoria. Among them were the familiar faces of Tony Roche, Jon Brown and Georgia Pritchett, three Britons with whom Armstrong had worked before on shows such as The Thick of It and Fresh Meat. They helped normalise the process, and at the outset Adam McKay, the director of The Big Short, who directed the pilot, was instrumental in settling him into prime position. “Adam’s a Hollywood figure but a very nice man,” says Armstrong. “He was very generous in showing me how to behave in an American TV environment and then by letting me take the role of showrunner, but remaining involved as executive producer.”
I tell him that I once visited David Chase on the set of The Sopranos, for which he was the showrunner, about halfway through its run, when it was widely touted as the greatest TV drama in history. I expected to find a man glorying in triumph, but instead saw someone with the weight of the world on his shoulders, exhausted-looking and rather depressed. How did Armstrong bear up under the pressures of being in a similar position?
“If I ever got depressed, it was because the next draft wasn’t right, the next episode wasn’t right, and it was all going to fall apart,” he says. “While you go through production, the machine is voraciously hungry and you need to keep feeding it, and feeding it material of the highest quality.”
No matter how much praise the show received, all that stood between him and a bad season was his own hard work and that of his co-writers and collaborators. Armstrong swears by the method of refining and rewriting until the last moment but accepts that it caused tensions with the actors, who were eager to learn their lines. This was particularly the case with Jeremy Strong (Kendall Roy), who is known for his lengthy method-style preparation, but Armstrong says the whole cast found it difficult. “We fought each other to a draw,” he says, “rather than ever settling on something that was entirely satisfactory.”
Despite these conflicts over finished scripts, Lucy Prebble, another British writer Armstrong recruited, says that he was a relaxing presence on set, even if the stress that he would quietly absorb sometimes caused him headaches. Perhaps once a season, she says, he would undergo a downturn in mood, which he largely kept to himself. “Then he would apologise profusely for it over email to everyone,” she says, “even though no one had noticed.”
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.”
She says that Armstrong is wary of big themes or a mythic approach to drama, and is instead much more comfortable examining the smallness of life in high stakes situations. “The basic rule I eventually managed to glean,” she says “was to start from the true and find the funny.”
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.”
Succession managed to build such an enormously compelling and tonally distinct universe, with its ferocious boardroom spats, private jet meetings and riotously scathing exchanges, that it felt less created than discovered in the end, as if Armstrong didn’t imagine the scenarios but merely pulled the curtain back to reveal them. One element of this authenticity was a willingness to allow improvisation from the actors, a practice that Armstrong had admired in the work of Iannucci and Morris and which, he says, McKay instituted in the pilot.
I assumed the critical death scene of Logan Roy, when his emotionally confused children took turns saying their last words to him into an unresponsive mobile phone, was the product of such improvisation. There was a magnificent inarticulacy to the proceedings, the stammering, um-filled failure of the characters to say anything coherent. It was a moment that was a microcosm of everything that was exceptional about Succession – shocking, funny, moving, disorienting and at the same time a superb commentary on mortality without making a show of it.
But in fact, as Faber & Faber’s published script of the fourth season shows, the scene appeared almost word for paralysed word how Armstrong had written it. He is quick to pay testament to the efforts of all the writers and performers involved, but such highly dramatic and yet darkly comic moments showcase his singular talents.
Armstrong grew up in Oswestry, a small Shropshire market town close to the Welsh border. Despite boasting a lively arts scene for a town of its size, it’s not the kind of place that is dizzy with activity. To a greater extent than a child growing up in a city, you had to make your own entertainment. His father was a further education teacher who later became a crime novelist, his mother worked in nursery schools and he has a younger sister. Within his family, he says, there was a premium placed on observing others: “I think there was a high degree of discussion of what people are like, a constant, interesting concern about why are other people how they are. Did you see this person behave in this way, why were they doing that?”
The world of politics and power felt a long way away, he says, almost fictional. The realisation during his stint as a political researcher that such worlds are real and that the people inhabiting them are not that different in their essential desires from anyone else helped give him the imaginative empathy to enter different walks of life as a writer. He was further aided by his writing partner Bain, whom he met at Manchester University, where he also met his wife, who works for the NHS – they have two children. Armstrong and Bain did the same creative writing course, as a minor part of their degrees. Bain was from London and privately educated, with one foot already planted in a more established world.
The pair began writing in earnest after Armstrong quit his political researcher job, contributing to the sketch show Smack the Pony and kids’ programmes such as My Parents Are Aliens. Their big breakthrough was Peep Show, which was first broadcast in 2003. A sitcom about two hapless, and pretty hopeless, flatmates in Croydon, south London, it harnessed an earthy social realism to some of the most outlandish plotlines and dialogue ever committed to videotape. When I spoke to Armstrong eight years ago, as the series was coming to its conclusion, he typically attributed much of its success to its stars, David Mitchell and Robert Webb.
Yet for Mitchell what really counted was Armstrong and Bain’s rigour – the intense planning that went into constructing the development of plotlines that were plausible no matter how extreme their outcomes. In an introduction he wrote for Succession’s second season’s published scripts, Frank Rich suggested the Mark and Jeremy characters of Peep Show were the embryo of Succession’s “disgusting brothers”, the soi-disant nickname of Tom and Greg. In both cases, the characters say indecently funny things without ever “looking for laughs”. In Peep Show, given that it was a sitcom, that shouldn’t have been that unusual (although it was), but in Succession, it cut across the dramatic direction of the show so that it was easy to miss a plot twist because you were too busy laughing at what someone had just said.
The humour also served as a means of humanising people who, from almost any other perspective, were utterly reprehensible. Nonetheless, in the first season, before the show had built momentum and a large following, many viewers were less enraptured by the comedy than enraged by the spoiled, privileged people on display. A familiar criticism early on was that it had no likable characters and, as Rich points out, the first reviews in the New York Times and Washington Post were mixed to negative. “Speaking as a former theatre critic,” says Rich, “I’ve never bought the idea that you can’t have awful characters. Take David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross – they’re savage, horrible guys stabbing each other in the back and it’s a classic that’s been an endless success in the United States and the UK.”
By midway through the second season, complaining that the characters were unlikable had become distinctly passé – a sign of someone who wasn’t taking much notice. The reviewers swiftly crunched their gears into reverse. What fascinated me about the nasty competitiveness and untrustworthiness of all the characters is that everyone had enough power and money not to care. But care they did and were willing to undergo humiliation to stay on the inside. Why? “When you read the biography of Robert Maxwell,” says Armstrong, “it’s notable that there were people of great intellect and accomplishment who were willing to be ornaments to his court, although he was unbelievably gross in every sense of the word. You saw it again with Trump. [Former attorney general] Bill Barr and [ex-secretary of state] Rex Tillerson were really quite significant in their own fields. I don’t stand on a high horse – I think we all know the slight impulse to be subsumed and to give your identity up to a patriarchal figure.”
Many of the best stories – Cain and Abel, King Lear, The Godfather – are at root family sagas or even patriarchal sagas. For all its trappings of wealth, its super-yachts, helicopters and limousines, Succession is at heart a story about a recognisable dysfunctional family, only with a hell of a lot of money thrown in on top. That rarefied milieu might have intimidated your average boy from Oswestry, but Armstrong used his outsider’s eye to bring an invitingly anxious perspective to Succession, as seen in the continual commentary by Tom (himself a midwestern arriviste) on the faux pas committed by his reluctant underling, cousin Greg. In tutoring Greg, it’s almost as if he’s telling us that this pinnacle he’s so desperate to reach doesn’t amount to very much more than expensive labels and strange social habits.
As for Armstrong, he has reached a different kind of pinnacle – the sort of career high that very few writers ever achieve. Will his future work live in the shadow of that success? “I’m aware that if I ever manage to have another really good idea for a TV show, I won’t enjoy having my subsequent material compared unfavourably to former work,” he says laughing.
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.”
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.”
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.”
In the meantime, he says he’s happy reading, playing sport (five-a-side and tennis) and taking time to think. He’s earned the break. Whatever comes next, he’s already staked a claim to being the finest comic tragedian of our times.
Jesse Armstrong will be taking part in Succession: An Evening With the Writers on 13 September at London’s Royal Festival Hall (sold out, returns only). It will be available to watch free online here at a later date. Succession: Season Four The Complete Scripts is published by Faber & Faber (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com
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