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‘Succession’ and The End of Television’s Golden Age Ian Martin
There’s something beautifully still and calm about collections of TV scripts: frozen in time, notionally occupying that sweet spot between the magic of writing and the magic of acting. And, as they’re published after everything’s been shot and cut and aired and watched and reviewed and garlanded, a script anthology is also the last word. It’s a warm glug of methadone after the primo fix of a beloved show has ended for good.
And the highly addictive Succession certainly finished this year on an exquisite low. After four seasons of total, late-capitalist landscaping, creator Jesse Armstrong and his peerless writing team wrapped it up with pitch-perfect bathos: sad prince Kendall Roy all beaten and droopy, watching the river flow, forever haunted by a drowning. We can’t go on with his story, or those of the other characters. But we can go back, and go in.
This year brought us the 39-episode codex, in four massive slabs. Paperback, but you still wouldn’t want to drop one on your foot. Irresistible to fans jonesing for more, and catnip to writers at any career stage, from the aspiring to the retiring. The volumes offer insight to anyone keen to understand the mechanics, the physics, of scriptwriting. All that palaver of moving pretend people through space, making them collide. The fine-tuned precision engineering of it. Scripts are like Haynes Manuals, a chance to poke about under the hood, under the skin. Here’s drama in musculoskeletal form. Messy humanity, fictional and real.
I can’t have been the only one to head straight to the penultimate episode, to the funeral, with that coruscating eulogy for the dead king Logan Roy from his brother Ewan. It was an electrifying moment on screen. Before he despairingly takes apart the “meagerness” of Logan’s worldview, we get two startling revelations about Logan the child. That he believed, and was allowed to believe, he gave his baby sister polio. And, when the two little brothers were crossing the Atlantic in wartime, the ship’s engines failed. “They told us—they told us children—if we spoke or coughed or moved an inch, the U-boats would catch the vibrations off the hull and torpedo us and we’d die in the drink, in the hold there. Three nights and two days we stayed quiet—a four-year-old and a five-and-a-half-year-old speaking with our eyes.”
Ewan’s speech looks quiet on the page but when the words were spoken by James Cromwell, echoing in the huge, vaulted guts of a church, they stopped me breathing. The words on the page, and the memory of their glory on screen, fold in upon one another to form a 3D version, an origami of the watched, the heard, and the read.
However, the written word, that’s your ur-text. It comes before the crackling back and forth, the rounds of table reads, rehearsals, rewrites, notes, on-set swerves, additional dialogue recording, all the way to the final edit. But, counterpoint to the Ewan eulogy: often a halting, nothing-looking, scrambled line on the page can ring out, as your inner ear bones hear the character. Here’s Kendall starting his eulogy: “Um, I’m going to try to—just to stand in for my brother and—I have his, our, words, my sister’s and my brothers’ but—I’m—I—I want to—some things have been said and I want to, to respond or, um, excuse me, I will try to find the words.”
The writers of Succession were—are—not only pretty much the best screenwriters in the world but also the most respected.1 Not least by Armstrong, a mensch who believes in the collaborative nature of writing. I was in the same gang as him years ago, in the early days of Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It, when Armstrong and Sam Bain were steering Peep Show to glory. He was always generous and supportive on Thick, where everyone got a pass on everyone else’s script. Pages were marked by Iannucci for newcomers with notes such as “Is there anything in Malcolm already knowing what’s happened? Could do with losing a third of all this.” When you were judged to be up to speed, it would be just a line marking the dialogue and a single word: shorter, funnier, and the one that looked absurdly vague but actually gave you freedom to think outward: better.
The best advice on writing I ever heard was from Bain, who said you should never strain for the right line, that you should be supple, not clenched. It’s a universal truth, and you can feel that credo rippling through the Succession scripts. In her introduction to season three, Lucy Prebble describes how the writers’ room resonated with maybes as, over weeks, stories evolved and hardened. How “a trick of writing is to stay open until you absolutely have to close down the narrative,” how the deliberate uncertainty of maybe carried over into the scripts. And it is striking how often, in action lines, a character is given the freedom to explore: “Josh maybe takes a bite, or checks his phone—a subtle gesture to betray confidence, before he casually slides in the blade.”
Uncertainty as a positive. The final season of Succession—nominated for 27 Emmys—aired in the middle of the months-long WGA writers’ strike, in an era of profound uncertainty in the world of TV. Streamers were just a few years ago juddering around like the giants from Game of Thrones, clubbing rivals out of the way with obliterating budgets. Now there’s a reining in, a dialing down. This year, two Big Questions hung quaveringly in the air, in corporate boardrooms resembling the glassy brain stem of Waystar Royco: “Is this the end of TV’s Golden Age?” and “Could AI write this?”
Inevitably, up popped the articles asking another question, perhaps the stupidest ever: “Could AI write Succession?” Spoiler alert: it could not. GPT4 took a shot at a two-hander and it wasn’t very good. This attempt at a closing scene for the finale is better, but only because it’s funnier—because it’s shit:
The siblings stand together, a united front. They address the board.
KENDALL: We’ve agreed to a power-sharing arrangement with Stewy and Sandi.
SHIV: (nods) We’ll each take on a significant leadership role.
ROMAN: We’ll face the future together. As a family.
The siblings exchange glances, signaling their commitment to each other and the company. The future is uncertain, but they’re prepared to face it head-on.
This one’s spookier, because the AI has the Roy family discuss the promise of AI, in exquisitely non-silky dialogue. Also, the AI sounds a bit up itself to be honest. “The room collectively exhales, relieved by Logan’s openness to explore AI’s potential.”
Ah yes, AI’s potential. The WGA strike ended in victory for writers because producers agreed with a straight face that AI would only be a tool, that it wouldn’t be used to replace part of the writing process. But some of us remember being on strike as journalists in the eighties, when Murdoch smuggled in his scabs and his computers; publishers assured everyone that the new digital process was a tool, and posed no threat to either writers or sub-editors. In truth, it was a meteorite that virtually wiped out the latter and critically devalued the former. The internet then swallowed up small ads, wiped out local journalism, offered news for free, and the rest is podcast.
But Luddites never win. And look, nobody’s saying AI can’t come up with killer lines, as screenwriter Simon Rich points out. He cites the creation of fake The Onion headlines by the code-davinci-002 program—“Experts Warn that War in Ukraine Could Become Even More Boring.” But really, how do you replicate the capricious meanderings of the writers’ room? Is it possible to create one from a diverse group of wisecracking algorithms, programmed variously to have imposter syndrome, diffidence disguised as arrogance, arrogance disguised as diffidence, sundry neuroses, lurching random kindnesses, and seven variants of panic?
If so, Succession’s creative process might end up being the last of the human-only writers’ rooms. Or maybe the money will run out and we’ll enter a new Bronze Age of TV and Succession will turn out to be the last of the gold-standard shows.
But then, the future of television has been in doubt before. In 1954, for instance, when the UK’s Independent Television Authority was created, which ended the BBC’s broadcasting monopoly, introduced the channel ITV and ad breaks, and foreshadowed a twenty-first-century TV culture driven and riven by money. The fearsome BBC chief Lord Reith certainly didn’t hold back: “Somebody introduced Christianity into England and somebody introduced smallpox, bubonic plague, and the Black Death. Somebody is minded now to introduce sponsored broadcasting.”
I wonder what Reith would have made of Succession. Would the defender of innovation be pleased that a Shakespearean tradition still has resonance? Logan Roy as Lear, at odds with his serially disappointing children. Kendall a method-acting Richard III, tragically trying until the last to horse-trade his kingdom.
It all starts with scribbled notes and a MacBook Air. Succession was, by a distance, the best television on television for years. And these scripts show why. Writing. What made it so great was the writing.
1.They deserve to be named here: Jesse Armstrong, Tony Roche, Jon Brown, Lucy Prebble, Georgia Pritchett, Jonathan Glatzer, Ted Cohen, Will Tracy, Susan Soon He Stanton, Alice Birch, Mary Laws, Francesca Gardiner, Lucy Kirkwood, Jamie Carragher, Gary Shteyngart, Nathan Elston, Miriam Battye, Cord Jefferson, Callie Hersheway, Will Arbery and Anna Jordan.
Ian Martin is a writer and a producer known for The Thick of It, In The Loop, Veep and The Death of Stalin. This piece originally appeared in Unherd.
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Shortly after midnight last night, the Justice Department released special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on former president Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The 137-page report concludes that “substantial evidence demonstrates that Mr. Trump…engaged in an unprecedented criminal effort to overturn the legitimate results of the election in order to retain power.”
The report explains the case Smith and his team compiled against Trump. It outlines the ways in which evidence proved Trump broke laws, and it lays out the federal interests served by prosecuting Trump. It explains how the team investigated Trump, interviewing more than 250 people and obtaining the testimony of more than 55 witnesses before a grand jury, and how Justice Department policy governed that investigation. It also explains how Trump’s litigation and the U.S. Supreme Court’s surprising determination that Trump enjoyed immunity from prosecution for breaking laws as part of his official duties dramatically slowed the prosecution.
There is little in the part of the report covering Trump’s behavior that was not already public information. The report explains how Trump lied that he won the 2020 presidential election and continued to lie even when his own appointees and employees told him he had lost. It lays out how he pressured state officials to throw out votes for his opponent, then-president-elect Joe Biden, and how he and his cronies recruited false electors in key states Trump lost to create slates of false electoral votes.
It explains how Trump tried to force Justice Department officials to support his lie and to trick states into rescinding their electoral votes for Biden and how, finally, he pressured his vice president, Mike Pence, to either throw out votes for Biden or send state counts back to the states. When Pence refused, correctly asserting that he had no such power, Trump urged his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol. He refused to call them off for hours.
Smith explained that the Justice Department concluded that Trump was guilty on four counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States by trying “to interfere with or obstruct one of its lawful governmental functions by deceit, craft or trickery, or at least by means that are dishonest”; obstruction and conspiracy to obstruct by creating false evidence; and conspiracy against rights by trying to take away people’s right to vote for president.
The report explains why the Justice Department did not bring charges against Trump for insurrection, noting that such cases are rare and definitions of “insurrection” are unclear, raising concerns that such a charge would endanger the larger case.
The report explained that prosecuting Trump served important national interests. The government has an interest in the integrity of the country’s process for “collecting, counting, and certifying presidential elections.” It cares about “a peaceful and orderly transition of presidential power.” It cares that “every citizen’s vote is counted” and about “protecting public officials and government workers from violence.” Finally, it cares about “the fair and even-handed enforcement of the law.”
While the report contained little new information, what jumped out from its stark recitation of the events of late 2020 and early 2021 was the power of Trump’s lies. There was no evidence that he won the 2020 election; to the contrary, all evidence showed he lost it. Even he didn’t appear to believe he had won. And yet, by the sheer power of repeating the lie that he had won and getting his cronies to repeat it, along with embellishments that were also lies—about suitcases of ballots, and thumb drives, and voting machines, and so on—he induced his followers to try to overthrow a free and fair election and install him in the presidency.
He continued this disinformation after he left office, and then engaged in lawfare, with both him and friendly witnesses slowing down his cases by challenging subpoenas until there were no more avenues to challenge them. And then the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in.
The report calls out the extraordinary July 2024 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Trump v. United States declaring that presidents cannot be prosecuted for official acts. “Before this case,” the report reads, “no court had ever found that Presidents are immune from criminal responsibility for their official acts, and no text in the Constitution explicitly confers such criminal immunity on the President.” It continued: “[N]o President whose conduct was investigated (other than Mr. Trump) ever claimed absolute criminal immunity for all official acts.”
The report quoted the dissent of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, noting that the decision of the Republican-appointed justices “effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding.”
That observation hits hard today, as January 14 is officially Ratification Day, the anniversary of the day in 1784 when members of the Confederation Congress ratified the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War and formally recognized the independence of the United States from Great Britain. The colonists had thrown off monarchy and determined to have a government of laws, not of men.
But Trump threw off that bedrock principle with a lie. His success recalls how Confederates who lost the Civil War resurrected their cause by claiming that the lenience of General Ulysses S. Grant of the United States toward officers and soldiers who surrendered at Appomattox Court House in April 1865 showed not the mercy of a victor but rather an understanding that the Confederates’ defense of human slavery was superior to the ideas of those trying to preserve the United States as a land based in the idea that all men were created equal.
When no punishment was forthcoming for those who had tried to destroy the United States, that story of Appomattox became the myth of the Lost Cause, defending the racial hierarchies of the Old South and attacking the federal government that tried to make opportunity and equal rights available for everyone. In response to federal protection of Black rights after 1948, when President Harry Truman desegregated the U.S. military, Confederate symbols and Confederate ideology began their return to the front of American culture, where they fed the reactionary right. The myth of the Lost Cause and Trump’s lie came together in the rioters who carried the Confederate battle flag when they breached the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Fox News Channel host Pete Hegseth, is adamant about restoring the names of Confederate generals to U.S. military installations. His confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee began today.
The defense secretary oversees about 1.3 million active-duty troops and another 1.4 million in the National Guard and employed in Reserves and civilian positions, as well as a budget of more than $800 billion. Hegseth has none of the usual qualifications of defense secretaries. As Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare pointed out today, he has “never held a policy role…never run anything larger than a company of 200 soldiers…never been elected to anything.”
Hegseth suggested his lack of qualifications was a strength, saying in his opening statement that while “[i]t is true that I don’t have a similar biography to Defense Secretaries of the last 30 years…as President Trump…told me, we’ve repeatedly placed people atop the Pentagon with supposedly ‘the right credentials’…and where has it gotten us? He believes, and I humbly agree, that it’s time to give someone with dust on his boots the helm.”
The “dust on his boots” claim was designed to make Hegseth’s authenticity outweigh his lack of credentials, but former Marine pilot Amy McGrath pointed out that Trump’s defense secretary James Mattis and Biden’s defense secretary Lloyd Austin, both of whom reached the top ranks of the military, each came from the infantry.
Hegseth has settled an accusation of sexual assault, appears to have a history of alcohol abuse, and has been accused of financial mismanagement at two small veterans’ nonprofits. But he appears to embody the sort of strongman ethos Trump craves. Jonathan Chait of The Atlantic did a deep dive into Hegseth’s recent books and concluded that Hegseth “considers himself to be at war with basically everybody to Trump’s left, and it is by no means clear that he means war metaphorically.” Hegseth’s books suggest he thinks that everything that does not support the MAGA worldview is “Marxist,” including voters choosing Democrats at the voting booth. He calls for the “categorical defeat of the Left” and says that without its “utter annihilation,” “America cannot, and will not, survive.”
When Hegseth was in the Army National Guard, a fellow service member who was the unit’s security guard and on an anti-terrorism team flagged Hegseth to their unit’s leadership because one of his tattoos is used by white supremacists. Extremist tattoos are prohibited by army regulations. Hegseth lobbied Trump to intervene in the cases of service members accused of war crimes, and he cheered on Trump’s January 6, 2021, rally. Hegseth has said women do not belong in combat and has been vocal about his opposition to the equity and inclusion measures in the military that he calls “woke.”
Wittes noted after today’s hearing that “[t]he words ‘Russia’ and ‘Ukraine’ barely came up. The words ‘China’ and ‘Taiwan’ made only marginally more conspicuous an appearance. The defense of Europe? One would hardly know such a place as Europe even existed. By contrast, the words ‘lethality,’ ‘woke,’ and ‘DEI’ came up repeatedly. The nominee sparred with members of the committee over the difference between ‘equality’ and ‘equity.’”
Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) spoke today in favor of Hegseth, and Republicans initially uncomfortable with the nominee appear to be coming around to supporting him. But Hegseth refused to meet with Democrats on the committee, and they made it clear that they will not make the vote easy for Republicans.
The top Democrat on the committee, Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) said he did not believe Hegseth was qualified for the position. Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) exposed his lack of knowledge about U.S. allies and bluntly told him he was unqualified, later telling MSNBC that Hegseth will be an easy target for adversaries with blackmail material.
Hegseth told the armed services committee that all the negative information about him was part of a “smear campaign,” at the same time that he refused to say he would refuse to shoot peaceful protesters in the legs or refuse an unconstitutional order.
After the release of Jack Smith’s report, Trump posted on his social media channel that regardless of what he had done to the country, voters had exonerated him: “Jack is a lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the Election, which I won in a landslide,” he wrote, lying about a victory in which more voters chose someone other than him. “THE VOTERS HAVE SPOKEN!!!”
It’s as if the Confederates’ descendants have captured the government of the United States.
Notes:
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-04-02-0026-0004
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-situation–the-cult-of-unqualified-authenticity
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/11/pete-hegseth-books-trump/680744/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/13/politics/pete-hegseth-confederate-generals-military-bases/index.html
Bluesky:
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X:
amymcgrathky/status/1879162507992215694
If you want to know what a post-woke military might look like, Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Pentagon just gave America a preview.
At his nomination hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Pete Hegseth pledged that he would direct his secretary of the Navy to focus on rebuilding the fleet instead of climate change. His secretary of the Army would focus on making war more lethal and effective, instead of figuring out how to build tanks that don’t run on gasoline. And the standards for military promotion would be based on merit, not a person’s skin color, sexuality, or gender.
Hegseth said that under his leadership, he would take steps to reverse the Pentagon’s decision to fire tens of thousands of service members who refused to take the Covid vaccine. “In President Trump’s Defense Department they will be apologized to. They will be reinstituted with pay and rank,” the nominee said.
It was a contentious hearing, as Democrats attacked Hegseth for everything from allegations of his marital infidelity and sexual assault to his lack of experience managing an organization as large and complex as the Pentagon. But the Republicans made Hegseth out to be the real victim, and by the time the hearing ended, it seemed like a near lock that he’ll be confirmed.
American lawmakers are about to determine the future of pornography, or they’re trying, at least. In recent years, nineteen states—most of them Republican-led—have passed legislation that requires any site with a significant amount of adult content to prove all its users are over 18. Most recently, on New Year’s Day, a new law called HB 3 took effect in my home state of Florida, where porn sites now face fines of up to $50,000 for every violation. But this week, such laws could be found unconstitutional.
This is all thanks to the Free Speech Coalition, a sort of NRA for pornographers, which has sued Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, a religious hard-liner, over that state’s age verification law. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear FSC’s case, which argues that these porn laws undermine free speech, infringe on privacy, and hurt American companies, while doing nothing to block foreign and fringe sites that don’t comply with U.S. laws.
The rationale behind the laws is understandable: Studies have shown that pornography consumption by teenagers can lead to misogynistic attitudes and increased sexual aggression. It’s also linked to mental health problems and increased rates of unsafe sex. More to the point, most parents are uncomfortable with the idea of their children having access to terabytes worth of hardcore pornography at the touch of a button.
But these laws are fundamentally pointless. First etched into mammoth tusks 40,000 years ago, porn predates the written word. It is inevitable—and in the internet age, infinitely accessible—even in places where so-called “porn bans” have been enacted.
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