Introduction

When Succession was commissioned by HBO I had previously managed to produce a grand total of one hour of filmed television drama as a solo writer. Even that was under the supervision of Charlie Brooker, within the tonal world he had created for his Black Mirror anthology. But after my second solo hour was complete – the Succession pilot – I rather suddenly found myself alone as the showrunner, final authority and decider on a hundred-million-dollar-plus enterprise. The step up in terms of responsibility was vertiginous. I bought a book called The TV Showrunner’s Roadmap, but was too intimidated and too busy to ever open it.*

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.

It was back when we were still writing the third season that I started sketching out options. Even though the motor in the room was still running hot and we still had ideas – lots and lots of ideas – and even though all the complicated ways people can be still felt inexhaustible, nevertheless the big plot engine, the brutal materialist plumbing which ran under the show, was looking to me like it would eventually start to lose pressure.

Out in the world, legacy media’s battle with tech was not a fair fight, it was a rout. The particular generational tussles that were the background to the show were ending the way all generational fights do, as Redstone passed away, Murdoch faded, Prince Philip and then Queen Elizabeth died. The swashbuckling dealmakers of the end of the last century, it seemed to me, had given way to the Thiel generation of Elon, Daniel Ek and Zuckerberg. The action had moved on and we needed to get out of legacy media almost as fast as Rupert had.

So once season three was complete and aired, in December 2021, I got my fellow executive-producer–writers together. Lucy, Tony, Jon and Will 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 goodbye 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.

We went round the room at the end of the day, this little committee on whether to whack the show. Will, the cold-hearted killer, voted over Zoom for just one more season. Jon thought two more. He had always imagined that five seasons was the right shape. Tony said that what he wanted for us, for himself, was to keep making the show, but in his heart he thought the creatively wise thing might be to end. Lucy, I think, put the question to bed: we could, if we wanted, keep going with a show that became increasingly rangy and fun – a climbing plant grown leggy but still throwing off beautiful blooms now and then. But the ten-episode season was the muscular way to go out.

The shape of the final season from then never really altered in its essentials: Logan to die early, a shock, as death so often comes in life; a blast from the captive bolt pistol, experienced as a shockwave by his children while some or all of them were at a wedding. 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 terms of the particulars of who might end up as CEO, since season two the idea of Tom winning out had started to glitter in the distance. Not only did the kids lack application, but also, crucially, they were arriving to this particular party at the wrong time. In the fifties and sixties, Murdoch could inherit and grow and thrive. Now if you weren’t a media founder, it felt more plausible for an amenable man like Tom to rise gently like a bubble of air in the tank. A corporate fusion of Kenneth Widmerpool and Joseph Stalin.

Notwithstanding this route map, all through the writing and shooting of the final season, with some gentle encouragement from Casey Bloys at HBO, I tried to keep the ‘multiple future season’ version of the show alive. Almost so that the show itself didn’t know it was ending – to keep things open, to allow other possibilities. Partly this was for creative reasons, so that the ending didn’t become freeze-dried and pre-packaged. But also because once we pulled the lever definitively, in a pure business sense, the metal gears of LA business, agents and managers would engage and crush all other possible futures out of existence.

But I never had a serious wobble. No other way of going forward felt persuasive. Even when I made the long walk from the season four room in Victoria, hot and queasy past the pelicans in St James’s Park, up to the Ivy restaurant to meet Brian Cox to tell him what I thought happened at Connor’s wedding. Even then – sad though I was, nervous, feeling a little like a man with a loaded revolver rather than a MacBook bumping at my damp shirt from my backpack, even then – I always had a feeling that this was just right. Whatever people made of the end of the show, we’d thought about it hard, and this was simply how this story had to go.

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?’

What’s so terrifying about writing a show is that, before each draft gets to the level it must, it is always totally possible that it will be a disaster. Indeed, it is only the certain knowledge of the terrible inadequacy of each episode that motivates all the work on the many drafts necessary to save it. And that grinding fear lasts for months, for years. The fear you’ll forget the heart of the show, that you’ll misplace it, get distracted by some shiny thing, get pulled off the true path by some seductive byway. I can barely describe before the show is written, before it is right, how empty and lacking and wrong it feels. How many days and weeks in Williamsburg and Long Island City there were fearing that this episode, this was the one where we lose control, run out of energy and let the whole enterprise be spoilt because of exhaustion or inattention.

And in amongst it, just occasionally, you feel you get it right and the words make a spell. 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’ – and then once in season two, rewriting the scene where Kendall tells Shiv he doesn’t know what he would be for if his dad didn’t need him.

What I recall most about that Kendall–Shiv scene, though, is not the writing, but how odd it was seeing the brilliant way it was executed on set. Sarah and me and Jeremy had a debate about who should first offer the hug. The actual human acting moment was all about execution, debate, discussion, looking at the angles with Georgia Pritchett and directors Bob Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman. How odd that at Christmas in Brixton it could make me cry, but on set up on the thirty-third floor of World Trade Center 7, it had already happened and all the extraordinary talent and engagement of the actors was focused on landing the fish, making payment on a cheque already written.

After wrestling through all this, the decision to publish the shooting scripts made me feel a little vulnerable. Not because I don’t think they’re of high enough quality. But because although I think they’re basically good and we did many drafts to get them right, the final draft of the show isn’t the script. It’s the version we air. My fellow writers and I always wrote and rewrote scripts with the knowledge that we could in safety try something a little more greyed-out and subtle, or a little odder, or a little more vivid and ‘red’, as Lucy Prebble would say in the room; knowing that if the execution on celluloid left something too opaque or too vivid we had a safety net. That we could dance closer to the precipice with the assurance that the final final edit was yet to come.

It’s a great freedom. Without the power American TV gives a showrunner the temptation can be to write in a closed-off, invulnerable way with every scene sleek and sealed – less prone to misexecution or misinterpretation. And that’s a shame. Because I do think the cracks are where the light gets in – the bits of a show that elbow out at odd angles, the bones that stick in your throat.

A friend who loved watching Darcey Bussell, the principal dancer at the Royal Ballet in the 2000s, explained to me once that what made her so compelling wasn’t that she executed her performances perfectly. It was that she also drew you in with the fear that she might be on the...