Succession – Season One: The Complete Scripts

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Editor’s note: Deadline’sIt Starts on the Page features 10 standout drama series scripts in 2023 Emmy contention. 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. Tender is not necessarily the first word you’d reach for when describing Succession, the story of a ruthless media entrepreneur and the battle of his rivalrous children to supplant him.

In tutoring Greg, it’s almost as if he’s telling us that this pinnacle he’s so desperate to reach doesn’t amount to very much more than expensive labels and strange social habits. I have written my first television sitcom pilot and I have recently sent the finished script into a TV scriptwriting contest. 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. This show, based on the DC Comics hero Green Arrow, is a great example of how to incorporate flashbacks as a major part of the narrative.I can barely describe before the show is written, before it is right, how empty and lacking and wrong it feels. Armstrong says that witnessing the discrepancy between presentation and ideals in politics, and the playing out of “quite normal human vanity and ambition”, made a lasting impression on him. Four works changed my mind: HBO’s excellent Robert Durst documentary, The Jinx; Sumner Redstone’s grimly business-focused autobiography, A Passion to Win; James B Stewart’s propulsive DisneyWar; and Tom Bower’s fascinating Robert Maxwell biography Maxwell: The Final Verdict.

Brent and Shari Redstone, with whom Sumner played a tough and complicated game of bait-and-switch over CBS-Paramount succession. Originally titled Thirty-Six, this is a solid family-based TV pilot script that first aired in 2016 on NBC. From left: Kieran Culkin, Brian Cox, Jesse Armstrong, Alan Ruck and Sarah Snook at the afterparty of the 2020 Golden Globes, where the show won the award for best drama, and Cox for best actor. So, out the back of a French-style bistro on a three-cappuccino high, I pitched it to their head of drama and comedy, Casey Bloys. By rejecting non-essential cookies, Reddit may still use certain cookies to ensure the proper functionality of our platform.Christopher Lloyd (who worked for many years on Frasier) came up with the idea for a family-based mockumentary during a discussion about families with co-creator Steven Levitan. But at the same time, if you do have something to say, there’s a danger that if you ever state it, it will kill the whole endeavor, so it lies flat and dead, like a propaganda leaflet dropped in the street. 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. 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.