Succession – Season One: The Complete Scripts

Product Information

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. 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. 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.

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? I still wonder whether Succession would have landed in the same way without the mad bum-rush of news and sensation Trump’s chaotic presidency provided. Trump wasn’t the firebombing of German civilians, and nor is Succession Slaughterhouse-Five, but I do sometimes think about Vonnegut saying no one in the world profited from the firebombing of Dresden, except himself. 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.

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.” 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. 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’.

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. 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 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. 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. 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. All the Bells Say,” written by Armstrong and directed by Mark Mylod, begins with Logan reading a story to his grandson Iverson (Quentin Morales) after Iverson’s dad Kendall almost drowned in the pool. Meanwhile, Roman and Shiv discover their father’s plans to sell the company without telling them. 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 4