In his introduction to the season-four scripts,Successions showrunner outlines his path to the final shot.
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The step up in terms of responsibility was vertiginous.
It was back when we were still writingthe third seasonthat I started sketching out options.
My sense was that we should do one last full-fat season rather than stretch it out.
We went round the room, this little committee on whether to whack the show.
Will, the coldhearted killer, voted over Zoom for just one more season.
Jon thought two more.
He had always imagined that five seasons was the right shape.
But the ten-episode season was the muscular way to go out.
The deal with GoJo had to go through.
That was the case in the world, so it had to be the case for us.
In the 50s and 60s, Murdoch could inherit and grow and thrive.
A corporate fusion of Kenneth Widmerpool and Joseph Stalin.
Partly this was for creative reasons, so that the ending didnt become freeze-dried and prepackaged.
But I never had a serious wobble.
No other way of going forward felt persuasive.
You start to feel you cant really remember what a story is.
What is it even that people like about a TV show?
And you’ve got the option to find yourself Googling, What is a story?
What things do people do?
And that grinding fear lasts for months, for years.
I remember just a couple of times being emotional as I wrote or rewrote.
Sarah and me and Jeremy had a debate about who should first offer the hug.
The final draft of the show isnt the script.
Its the version we air.
Its a great freedom.
And thats a shame.
What I always hoped for in the show was that sense of something you couldnt look away from.
Episodes that both demand the viewers full attention and were worthy of it.
And that quality comes from the careful plotting in the room, and then careful writing and rewriting.
But it also comes from what we choose to leave out.
If you dont have anything you want to say, theres a danger the show will never live.
And thats a good thing.
Which doesnt mean that the annual article, Is satire dead?
is ever going to be more fresh.
That article will forever be boring and wrong.
But it does mean the satirical approach needs to come in at a different angle.
It probably always does, every generation.
Comforting the afflicted feels relatively straightforward.
But afflicting the comforted?
Maybe it will go better if you avoid announcing your intention too clearly at the door.
I went intoSuccessionnot really knowing what a showrunner is.
As we finish, Im still not entirely sure.
I think of myself as essentially a writer.
You wont find the end of the show, as it went to air, written in the scripts.
That we found on the day.
Jesse Armstrong donated the fee for this article to the Entertainment Community Fund.
