A few minutes before Jesse Armstrong was scheduled to call for a chat earlier this month, he sent a polite text saying that he was “adrift in traffic”: could he delay by fifteen? Traffic congestion served as an early plot point in Season 1 of “Succession”: who can forget the excruciating sequence in which Kendall Roy, having plotted the boardroom ouster of Logan Roy, the patriarch who won’t move on, is stuck in traffic—forced to leap out of his car in order to run in his leather-soled shoes toward the Waystar Royco headquarters, delivering his regicidal ultimatum while gasping for breath over the speakerphone? Seeing the ways in which even the super-rich cannot insulate themselves entirely against the vagaries of the outside world—traffic, weather—is one of the many pleasures offered by “Succession.” In three seasons since the show débuted, in June of 2018, as an unsettling comedy-drama hybrid, it has become an ensemble exploration of gnarled humanity at the highest levels of power, offering resonances with contemporary media dynasties and the Julio-Claudians alike.
When Armstrong got on the phone, precisely fifteen minutes after the appointed time, he sounded much calmer than the harried would-be usurper, played by Jeremy Strong, whom he had created. There had merely been busier thoroughfares anticipated on his route from Williamsburg, where he stays when he is in New York—Armstrong’s home is London—to the editing suites in Greenwich Village, where he was working on the show’s upcoming season, which airs on HBO starting next month. But the occasion of the call nonetheless felt consequential: Armstrong was ready to reveal that this season, the fourth, would be the last. In our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Armstrong talks about his collaborative creative process, the cliffhanger end of Season 3, his decision to bring his creation to its dramatic conclusion, and whether there will be a successor to “Succession.”
Before we talk about why this is the last season of “Succession,” why have you decided to talk about the fact that this is going to be the last season of “Succession”?
There are a few different aspects. One, we could have said it as soon as I sort of decided, almost when we were writing it, which I think would be weird and perverse. We could have said it at the end of the season. I quite like that idea, creatively, because then the audience is just able to enjoy everything as it comes, without trying to figure things out, or perceiving things in a certain way once they know it’s the final season. But, also, the countervailing thought is that we don’t hide the ball very much on the show. I feel a responsibility to the viewership, and I personally wouldn’t like the feeling of, “Oh, that’s it, guys. That was the end.” I wouldn’t like that in a show. I think I would like to know it is coming to an end.
And, also, there’s a bunch of prosaic things, like it might be weird for me and the cast as we do interviews. It’s pretty definitively the end, so then it just might be uncomfortable having to sort of dissemble like a politician for ages about it. Hopefully, the show is against bullshit, and I wouldn’t like to be bullshitting anyone when I was talking about it.
It’s like when you’re reading a book, you know how far away from the end of the book you are. As a reader or viewer, there can be something very satisfying in the sense of knowing that you are coming to an end.
Exactly! And, as an author, you might wish to not have that, so that the ending could land. But really the ending needs to work on its own merits. You can’t hope to pull the rug in that way. I hope that no one ever thinks that we are outstaying our welcome—that we’re going to do a dud season, or be stretching it out. I hope those concerns never occur to people. I know they do when I’m watching other people’s shows, even ones I admire and like.
What made you decide that it was time to end “Succession”?
It’s been a bit tortured, and I felt unexpectedly nervous about talking to you, because it’s all theoretical until this point, and I have tried to keep it theoretical for a whole number of reasons. Who knows about the psychological reasons, but the creative ones were that it felt really useful to not make the final, final decision for ages. You know, there’s a promise in the title of “Succession.” I’ve never thought this could go on forever. The end has always been kind of present in my mind. From Season 2, I’ve been trying to think: Is it the next one, or the one after that, or is it the one after that?
I got together with a few of my fellow-writers before we started the writing of Season 4, in about November, December, 2021, and I sort of said, “Look, I think this maybe should be it. But what do you think?” And we played out various scenarios: We could do a couple of short seasons, or two more seasons. Or we could go on for ages and turn the show into something rather different, and be a more rangy, freewheeling kind of fun show, where there would be good weeks and bad weeks. Or we could do something a bit more muscular and complete, and go out sort of strong. And that was definitely always my preference. I went into the writing room for Season 4 sort of saying, “I think this is what we’re doing, but let’s also keep it open.” I like operating the writing room by coming in with a sort of proposition, and then being genuinely open to alternative ways of going. And the decision to end solidified through the writing and even when we started filming: I said to the cast, “I’m not a hundred per cent sure, but I think this is it.” Because I didn’t want to bullshit them, either.
So even when you’re shooting there’s a possibility in your mind that you could keep it going to Season 5?
I don’t know whether that’s a psychological trick on myself, to stop being sad about stopping doing something which I really, really enjoyed. Or it’s a creative trick to not make us get lachrymose or sentimental, or to kind of do it differently than we have done before. And a certain percentage of not definitively saying early on that this was the last season was also a feeling that sometimes on the show, previously, we’ve discovered plot avenues, character dynamics, which have demanded we follow them. And therefore not wanting to definitively close off the possibility of that happening this season—at least until it got weird to not say, O.K., I think this really is it.
Did you always have an idea of where “Succession” was going to end up?
Not when I was writing the pilot, nor probably in the Season 1 room, but I think, growing from about Season 2, I started to know where I thought it should end. I don’t keep that secret because that’s what the writing room is there for: to test the ideas out. The show is an artifice—you are making up the story. And yet there are certain ideas which feel organic and some which feel inorganic, and I guess the writing-room process for me is a great way of making a piece of artifice feel organic to us, and to myself.
At the end of Season 3, the Roy kids finally come together, but the only way that they can come together is in unity against their father. The tragedy of the Roy family is that it’s impossible to achieve a kind of equilibrium, in which everyone has got what they want. Is that right?
This starts getting into the uncomfortable bit for me, which is telling people what to think about the show, or that there are some unbreakable rules. But I think your observation is correct about human dynamics, especially family dynamics, especially powerful-family dynamics. But those things aren’t laws. Other people can reach accommodations and find ways to work together.
Brian Cox said in an interview that Logan loves his children desperately, and that’s his weakness.
I think it’s true. You get into a bit of Prince Charles territory: What does love mean, when you never express it, and do things which are antithetical to what most people would consider to be love? But I think that Logan Roy would, rhetorically, reject any suggestion that he didn’t love his children to the utmost. And he has a whole intellectual defense system against the criticism that he’s done anything other than be loving. And I think it’s also important for Brian, playing Logan, to feel that thing underneath. There’s a version of this character who’s a caricature—who’s just the worst man in the world—and I hope we haven’t portrayed quite that.
At the end of Season 3, Logan says, “I fucking win,” but it’s at the expense of having these three children who are broken shells.
It’s just very complicated, isn’t it? I mean, he is not a terribly sophisticated person emotionally. But all of us, on a sort of personal and generational level, how do we feel about being succeeded by the next people who are coming along? Well, there’s a certain amount of pride and enjoyment. But there’s a certain amount of extreme, pressed anger at the passing of your prime, and your powers, and eventually your life. Logan is continually expressing his desire for this sort of imperial or monarchical—I’m trying to avoid the word “succession,” but—succession. And, at the same time, as a human being, he desperately wants to win. That includes winning over these people he sees before him, to whom he wants to give power and influence. He wants them to be able to inherit it. He’s a good vessel for that paradox.
Season 3 ended with a shot of Shiv’s face after she’s been betrayed by her mother, and her father, and, finally, by her husband. The mask of competence disappears, and the vulnerability and pain show through. Each season you have gone deeper and deeper into the pain of the Roys: on the surface, the show is a comedy, but there’s also this very, very anguished human experience that they’re all going through.
In the writers’ room, we have occasionally had a kind of recurring phrase: “Which is the most funny thing that could happen here, and by that I mean the most painful?” And, sometimes, “Which is the most painful thing that can happen here, by which I mean the most funny?” By no means do I find it funny when you see that shot of Shiv at the end of the season, but there is some odd way in which those things are interlinked. If you’re trying to mine that intensity of emotion, eventually you’re going to deplete it. Not that human beings don’t carry on living lives full of pain and anguish and complication—but, from a dramatic point of view, that seam becomes mined. And although I wish, in a way, to carry on doing this thing with this group of actors and writers forever, I wouldn’t want to be going down the mine, going deeper and deeper for more and more vanishingly thin seams of gold, or whatever ore it is we go mining for.
And then there’s Kendall, who is practically dead at the end of Season 3. And yet, in Season 4, he has to come back to life.
There’s something awful, and something wonderful, isn’t there, about the fact that human life has to carry on even though it’s gone through maybe a crisis that looks like it will be completely transformative or completely denude a person of all power? Guess what—they still have to get up and carry on. Kendall is quite resilient in certain ways, and maybe some of that is sort of a mental defect. Maybe it is in all of us—being able to be resilient in the face of really tough things. But it’s a human thing, and he’s got it.
Let’s talk about Tom for a second. You’d laid the bread crumbs for what happened—when he betrayed the kids to Logan—but, when he flipped, people got very excited.
Some people seem to have this reaction where they get Tom but have these questions about him, like: Why are he and Shiv together? And how did he do this? Hopefully, it’s in that good area of being a mystery and not a muddle. Hopefully he’s a bit mysterious, in that way that you find human beings in life mysterious.
Season 1 began with Logan’s eightieth birthday party. Season 4 begins with another birthday party for Logan. Is it a year that has passed, or longer?
I like everything having real-life models and examples, but the time frame is where I have to hold my hands up and say, Look, TV is just really hard. We’ve been doing the show for six or seven years, and people have aged, but the story moves at a pace that the story demands. I think that there’s probably been a couple of years elapsed in story time, but, to an audience, and indeed to ourselves as writers, it feels rather longer. The show has to live in a weird TV reality.
But no point trying to count the candles on the cake. I know you spend a lot of time in the writers’ room looking at current events. What kind of story lines in the real world have influenced this season? Have you been paying a lot of attention to Elon Musk?
Sometimes when you’re in the writers’ room and having one of those “Can we do this?” thoughts—for good and for ill, mostly ill, the last half decade has invited writers to not worry too much about pushing the boundaries of what’s acceptable political public corporate behavior. If you read the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal, you’d have a good sense of where we thought the show would go because it’s trying to reflect the world.
I remember once asking you if you were following what was going on with the British Royal Family, and you looked at me, like, no. But, with all that’s been going on with them lately, I wondered if you had been tempted to look closer at that real-life succession.
It’s been a human drama, and anyone who comes from the U.K., and even the U.S., has obviously been sort of more drawn into it, with the heir and the spare. It is interesting to note that these are not dynamics that the show was unfamiliar with, because every single corporation and monarchy and empire has these crises around succession, because it’s so potent. I guess I’m interested in how that succession intersects with power. And that’s why the British monarchy fundamentally feels comic to me, rather than anything else. Not that it doesn’t have a lot of cultural power and isn’t a huge part of the national psyche. But because, if it were ever to draw its sword from the scabbard, it would probably be made of vanilla sponge cake.
So, Jesse, how are you feeling about giving up this thing, and saying goodbye to it?
I feel deeply conflicted. I quite enjoy this period when we’re editing—where the whole season is there—but we haven’t put it out yet. I like the interregnum.
And I also quite liked the period when my close collaborators and I knew that this was probably it, or this was it, but hadn’t had to face up to it in the world. It’s been a difficult decision, because the collaborations—with the cast, with my fellow-writers, with Nick Britell and Mark Mylod and the other directors—they’ve just been so good. And I feel like I’ve done the best work I can do, working with them. And HBO has been generous and would probably have done more seasons, and they have been nice about saying, It’s your decision. That’s nice, but it’s also a responsibility in the end—it feels quite perverse to stop doing it.
So I do feel conflicted about that. And I feel sad, and I have the circus-has-left-town feeling that everyone gets who works on a production that’s good, and this one particularly so. I imagine I’ll be a little bit lonely, and wandering the streets of London in a funk, and wondering, What the fuck did I do? I’ll probably be calling you up in about six months asking if people are ready for a reboot.
Well, John Cleese just showed that it doesn’t matter how long you wait—it’s never too late. [Cleese recently announced a reboot of “Fawlty Towers,” which originally ran in the nineteen-seventies for two seasons and twelve episodes.]
I do think that this succession story that we were telling is complete. This is the muscular season to exhaust all our reserves of interest, and I think there’s some pain in all these characters that’s really strong. But the feeling that there could be something else in an allied world, or allied characters, or some of the same characters—that’s also strong in me. I have caveated the end of the show, when I’ve talked to some of my collaborators, like: Maybe there’s another part of this world we could come back to, if there was an appetite? Maybe there’s something else that could be done, that harnessed what’s been good about the way we’ve worked on this. So that is another true feeling. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
