Succession – Season One: The Complete Scripts

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Just like in our post on the best screenplays to read, we’ve broken down our list of the best TV scripts into the following categories: I wonder if the sad I’d be from being without you might be less than the sad I get from being with you? Reuniting the executive producers of 24, Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa, this show was based on the Israeli TV series, Hatufim. The pair developed the idea in early 2010 and Showtime green-lit it in 2011. While its later seasons came in for a fair amount of criticism, these early TV scripts are well worth studying. Armstrong with Brian Cox during the filming of season two of Succession. Photograph: Zach Dilgard, HBO

Casual is a great example of a TV dramedy, mixing both drama and comedy into its TV scripts about an uptight newly divorced woman struggling to navigate life with her daughter and unpredictable brother. If this is your genre, this pilot is worth breaking down and studying. The list contains examples of single-camera, multi-camera, half-hour, one-hour, network and cable pilots and TV specs, so pretty much every formatting option is also covered. 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.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. This TV series was created by British screenwriter, Steven Knight who hails from the same area of Birmingham as the show’s setting. As he began researching the project, he was surprised to find that the gangster stories he’d heard growing up hadn’t been embellished at all—in fact, they’d been toned down. Of course, knowing that the arc of the season is essentially right doesn’t mean that the writing goes easily. No, there are still many days when you stare at the index cards which were supposed to spell out the spine of the episode and they no longer connect. You start to feel you can’t really remember what a story is. What is it even that people like about a TV show? About anything? What is true? And you can find yourself Googling, “What is a story?” “What things do people do?” “What is interesting?” When writing TV show scripts based on superheroes, remember the advice of this show’s creator, Bruno Heller. He notes: “Frankly, all those superhero stories I’ve seen, I always love them until they get into the costume.” After this point, “they’ve stopped becoming humans.”

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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.” This seven-episode Western mini-series is a great example of how TV is attracting some of the very best feature writers. In this case, Scott Frank wrote the series exclusively for Netflix and it went on to win many awards including Outstanding Writing for a Long Form from the WGA West. The writing of Succession has consistently been among the best of the era, in any form. It is a privilege to be able to collect and publish it in this way, for any lover of the show, and any reader who values outstanding writing, to treasure.’

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.”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. Loosely based on the Murdoch family, Jesse Armstrong‘s Succession tells a story of the power struggle within a wealthy, media-company-owning family. The HBO series has won nine Emmys including two wins for Armstrong in the Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series category. After missing a year due to the Covid pandemic, Succession returned with its most critically acclaimed season to date. Faber Members have access to live and online events, special editions and book promotions, and articles and quizzes through our weekly e-newsletter.

Become a Faber Member for free and receive curated book recommendations, special competitions and exclusive discounts.Another Showtime production is this British-American Horror series, developed by John Logan. He wrote the TV pilot script on spec and it’s a great example of how to incorporate characters from the public domain into your work, such as Dorian Gray, Van Helsing and Count Dracula.