I guess the simple things at the heart of Succession ended up being Brexit and Trump. The way the UK press had primed the EU debate for decades. The way the US media’s conservative outriders prepared the way for Trump, hovered at the brink of support and then dived in. The British press of Rothermere, Maxwell, Murdoch and the Barclay brothers, and the US news environment of Fox and Breitbart. It’s a generous decision on their behalf. It means the artful mechanics of how the show came to be are laid bare.

I wonder if the sad I'd be from being without you might be less than the sad I get from being with you? 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, asConnor prepares to launch an unlikely bid for president. Collected here for the first time, the complete scripts of Succession: 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. Screenplays continually shift over a film or TV show’s development. Countless drafts are authored during pre-production. New ideas get dropped in by writers, actors and directors while on set. Even once the shooting stops, it isn’t over. Not only are cuts made in the edit, but new lines of dialogue are craftily dropped in. 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. I wonder if the sad I’d be from being without you might be less than the sad I get from being with you?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. Collected here for the first time, the complete scripts of Succession: SeasonOne feature unseen extra material, including deleted scenes, alternativedialogue and character directions, and an exclusive introduction from creatorand showrunner, Jesse Armstrong. They reveal a unique insight into the writing,creation and development of a TV sensation and a screen-writing masterpiece. With an exclusive introduction from creator Jesse Armstrong.

The beloved HBO series hit viewership highs with its fourth season, bringing in 2.3 million viewers to its premiere and reaching a record 2.6 million viewers for its fourth episode.The first thing you have to ask when you are publishing a screenplay is: what is the essential version of the script? 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. Given there is no single moment when the text is stable, which version do you publish? What do you do?

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’.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— 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”. The complete, authorised scripts, including deleted scenes, of the multiple award-winning Succession . 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.