Succession – Season One: The Complete Scripts

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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 And then there is the improvised group hug of the three siblings at the airport that became one of the episode’s most talked about moments. 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

The scripts will be accompanied by previously unseen extra material, which will include deleted scenes, alternative dialogue and character directions.But of all the challenges and responsibilities of the years running the show, the question that weighed by far the heaviest was deciding when to draw it to a close. 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. 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. 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.

Armstrong with Brian Cox during the filming of season two of Succession. Photograph: Zach Dilgard, HBO Succession: Season One will include an exclusive introduction from creator and showrunner Jesse Armstrong. Season Two, Season Three and Season Four will also include exclusive introductions by other screenwriters on the show including executive producer Frank Rich and executive producer and writer Lucy Prebble. Seasons One, Two and Three will be published on 18th May, with Succession: Season Four shortly following the end of that series.Collected here for the first time, the complete scripts of Succession: Season One 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. 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. 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’

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. 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. 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.Faber has scooped the complete, authorised scripts to all four seasons of the Emmy-winning HBO Original drama series "Succession", complete with introductions from the writers. Show Leave a Comment ‘This Was Simply How This Story Had to Go’ https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/7a0/d93/5dc470c7b5066dfe4cac098d1384f7b5af-succession-script.jpg