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

Underscoring the Shakespearean parallels Succession has been subjected to from the start, “Connor’s Wedding” feels like a play, with most of the action happening in confined spaces in real time — on the yacht where the wedding takes place and on the plane where Logan dies. 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.’” Show Leave a Comment ‘This Was Simply How This Story Had to Go’ https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/7a0/d93/5dc470c7b5066dfe4cac098d1384f7b5af-succession-script.jpgAfter HBO commissioned the series, he began writing the script for the pilot in a small flat in Brixton in the lead up to the Brexit referendum and the first cast read-through took place in New York on 8 November 2016 – the day Donald Trump was elected president. 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. 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." 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.

The world of politics and power felt a long way away, he says, almost fictional. The realisation during his stint as a political researcher that such worlds are real and that the people inhabiting them are not that different in their essential desires from anyone else helped give him the imaginative empathy to enter different walks of life as a writer. He was further aided by his writing partner Bain, whom he met at Manchester University, where he also met his wife, who works for the NHS – they have two children. Armstrong and Bain did the same creative writing course, as a minor part of their degrees. Bain was from London and privately educated, with one foot already planted in a more established world. 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. 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’. 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 of Succession have taken on a life of their own, with the published collections of Season 1-3 scripts shooting up to the top of the bestselling lists in the wake of the series finale on Sunday.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.” You sense that despite the monumental achievement and global recognition of Succession, sitcom remains his first love. “I’d love to work with Sam again,” he says of his sometime partner Bain. “I think we both would. It was not an unhappy Beatles breakup and we have some things cooking.” 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.”

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.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.