He outlines his case in which he accepts that the streaming companies have taken a hit recently, but he maintains they are still highly profitable and those profits should be more favourably shared with the people who create their content and that writers should be protected from the threat of AI.

He never directed an episode of Succession, mostly owing to a shortage of time. He says he would be interested in directing a feature film, but he prefers the time and space allowed by TV. “I like to be able to elaborate, rather than the crystalline thing of a movie, that you only get one shot at the idea and then you have to move on. Maybe it’s because I come out of sitcom, where you try to juice every drop out of every situation.” 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.” Seasons One, Two and Three will be out on 18 May with Season Four shortly following the end of that series. 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. RuPaul’s Drag Race’ Production Designer Gianna Costa On Bringing Sci-Fi Into The “Drag Universe” With “Blame It On The Edit”

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.

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.” I wonder if he is concerned that his perspective, particularly his comic social edge, might be affected by his own material success, which has completely removed the main preoccupation of most writers – the need to pay the bills. “I think you’ll have to wait and to see if maybe I’ll end up writing the next show from some very different angle,” he says, laughing again, but a little more nervously. “I hope not, but it’s something you can’t ignore.” 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. 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.” 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.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. 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. Armstrong agrees: “That comic facility was very important to me. I feel reassured when even in the midst of tragedy there is a sort of comic ironic flavour to the turn of events.”

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.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

The scripts will be accompanied by previously unseen extra material, which will include deleted scenes, alternative dialogue and character directions. 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. 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. 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.So once season three was complete and aired, in December 2021, I got my fellow executive-producer–writers together. Lucy Prebble, Tony Roche, Jon Brown, and Will Tracy joined me at my office in Brixton to look at the alternative future-season shapes I’d written up on the walls: one final season of ten episodes, or two of six or eight episodes. My sense was that we should do one last full-fat season rather than stretch it out. But I was wary of saying good-bye too fast to all the relationships and opportunities, of leaving creative money on the table, regretting all the subplots that would go unwritten, the jokes left untold. Bowler said: "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." 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.’ 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. I remember just a couple of times being emotional as I wrote or rewrote. Once in Logan’s death episode, which came in a tumble, the long middle section barely revised after its first draft, when Shiv calls her dying or dead father ‘Daddy.’”