Succession – Season One: The Complete Scripts

Product Information

I think a lot of the better films and TV shows I’ve been involved with have at their heart a quite simple impulse around which the more subtle layers are spun. In the Loop’s spark was anger at the Iraq war. Chris Morris’s Four Lions I think was driven by his gut feeling that something was very wrong with the way we understood jihadi terrorism in the UK. Peep Show was about oddball male friendship, perhaps even “masculinity”. Logan hands Kendall a pen. Beat between them. Can son trust father? The father clearly wants this – and the son wants to be liked, to demonstrate his trust— For its third season, the writers’ room moved to London’s Victoria, recruiting more US names including Ted Cohen (Friends, Veep) as it continued to craft the conflict between Kendall and Logan. They wrapped in February 2020, just prior to Covid restrictions being imposed. However, delays in filming necessitated some later rewrites. It’s a generous decision on their behalf. It means the artful mechanics of how the show came to be are laid bare.

Pritchett: It’s also about: “How much can you get away with when you’re rich?” Which is pretty much anything. I had a lot of ideas about how it might change Kendall and how he’d become a better person. But, no. It certainly affected him for a bit but – rather brilliantly – he’s moved on. ‘I’d been reading about Stalin ’: the show gains ground 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’.

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.

Jesse Armstrong (creator and executive producer): When we were starting the show, it was that great period when we all thought it was hilarious that Trump was doing what he was doing – he was a joke candidate whom the establishment would never let happen. We started shooting when the conventional wisdom was still that Hillary would win. Any similarities to the family in the show are coincidental – that was us putting our aerial into the general political and cultural ether, rather than trying to reflect it. Given there is no single moment when the text is stable, which version do you publish? What do you do?Underscoring the Shakespearean parallels Succession has been subjected to from the start, “Connor’s Wedding” feels like a play, with most of the action happening in confined spaces in real time — on the yacht where the wedding takes place and on the plane where Logan dies. Seasons One, Two and Three will be out on 18 May with Season Four shortly following the end of that series. Ted Cohen (writer) : I love writing for underdog characters. And they’re all underdogs, except for Logan, which is probably why it’s so much fun. Tom and Roman are just so heartbreaking. As an American, I always want to create a happy ending and you’re never allowed to do that on Succession. I’m a frustrated optimist. If you’re a member of a family like the Roys, it’s like being a royal: you don’t get to leave. You’re addicted to the pain. So I don’t think it’s done because we’re all sadists or anything like that. Perhaps the best part of Redstone’s autobiography for a casual reader is the opening, where he recounts clinging by one hand to a hotel balcony through a fire. Despite suffering third-degree burns over half his body, years of rehabilitation, excruciatingly painful skin grafts, he says this event, after which he made all his biggest business plays, had no impact whatsoever on the trajectory of his life. Greg, I guess, was a distant relative of the sort of political adviser I had myself briefly been. Gormless, clueless, out of place and gauche. But not without an eye for a deal. And, I hope, a little more wheedling and insinuating than I ever was. The scenes flowed. I put all research aside and followed my nose and wrote pretty much exactly what I wanted

Greg and Tom came fast, too. Tom from two roots. One was thinking about the sort of lunks I’ve occasionally seen powerful women choose as partners. Plausible, manly men with big watches and a soothing affable manner. That mixed with the deadly courtier, a more 18th-century figure, minutely attuned to shifts in power and influence, an invisible deadly gas that occurs in certain confined places and rises to kill anyone unwise enough not to take precautions. A hanger-on sustained by some Fitzgeraldian illusions about the world, a sense that perhaps the rich really are different from us and a romantic ambition to make it in New York City. Pritchett: After the finale of season two, Kendall gets to be Meghan. He’s putting himself outside the family. He doesn’t get his Oprah interview, but some other stuff goes down …Pritchett: One of the writers was getting divorced this season, and went to the loo and accidentally weed on his divorce papers. We thought maybe Kendall could do that, but we never got it in. ‘There’s a civil war coming ’: season three 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’ I wonder if the sad I’d be from being without you might be less than the sad I get from being with you? Season two marked out Succession as the show that everyone was watching, with the series winning big at the 2020 Emmys, with prizes for acting, writing, best drama, and directing. The writers were also starting to see a marked change. Armstrong: I was keen to get across the correspondence between some of these moguls and authoritarian regimes. I’d been reading a bit about Stalin, and how he would do these dinner parties where he would encourage everyone to get drunk, but he wouldn’t drink. Then he would make horrible jokes to Molotov or whoever about their potential torture or the murder of their colleagues.