Succession – Season Three: The Complete Scripts

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Succession’s second series saw it gain a reputation as one of the most exciting shows on television. Logan’s paranoia and control only increased, and Kendall ventured into startup culture. It starts with what Armstrong calls alts. “For each day’s filming, a day or two ahead, I select a few lines—sometimes none, sometimes 10 to 15—where we might find a spot for something funnier or better or truer,” Armstrong writes. “Usually funnier. These go out to a group of three to five fellow writers” who ultimately yield between five and 10 possible lines, some or all of which are then fed to actors for alternate takes. 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." In the end, we’ve been left with just 39 episodes of Succession, but reading through the book of scripts feels like finding a trove of more. Sometimes it’s a scene that didn’t make the cut, like Shiv and Rava passive-aggressively planning a lunch. Sometimes it’s an idea that didn’t make it past infancy in the writers room. (Prebble writes that “for a while there, for a playful couple of hours, we were a show where Tom went to jail.”) Sometimes it’s a proposed song that was excised. (Imagine a version of Succession that contains a “Walking on Sunshine” needledrop, as Armstrong originally proposed to conclude the series’ third episode, rather than Nicholas Britell’s iconic score!)

Armstrong: I was keen to get across the correspondence between some of these moguls and authoritarian regimes. I’d been reading a bit about Stalin, and how he would do these dinner parties where he would encourage everyone to get drunk, but he wouldn’t drink. Then he would make horrible jokes to Molotov or whoever about their potential torture or the murder of their colleagues.Roche: I suppose we often thought about it from the media element, but essentially, it’s a family story, and it turns out a lot of people have families, so it’s quite relatable. It is worrying when people say, “Oh, my dad is like Logan,” because you think: “That’s not good.” Tony Roche and Georgia Pritchett on set: ‘This big American drama was written by a group of scruffy, shambolic British comedy writers.’ Succession, season one. Photograph: Colin Hutton/HBO Speaking on HBO’s official Succession podcast, Strong repeatedly gave credit to the wordy behind-the-scenes blueprints that had helped him envision both the strength of his load-bearing lines and the nuts and bolts of his craftsmanlike performance. For example, Strong gushed, Armstrong had “set up this incredible dichotomy this season” for his character, Kendall Roy. “He’d written this stage direction …” Pritchett: After the finale of season two, Kendall gets to be Meghan. He’s putting himself outside the family. He doesn’t get his Oprah interview, but some other stuff goes down …

Prebble: Someone in New York put on an off-off-Broadway production of Sands, the play which Willa writes in our show. That sort of thing makes you go: this has gone bonkers. If you’re a member of a family like the Roys, it’s like being a royal: you don’t get to leave. You’re addicted to the pain Writer/producer Lucy Prebble & Kieran Culkin, who plays Roman, on the set of Succession, season one. Photograph: Ursula Coyote/HBO The complete, authorised scripts, including deleted scenes, of the multiple award-winning Succession .Carragher: One of our writers went to a wedding where they named the tables after TV characters that they liked, and Cousin Greg was one of them, which was a sign of how things had tipped over. The ‘Boar on the Floor’ episode: ‘Brian did a phenomenal job. Everyone on set was terrified.’ Succession, season two. Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy

Season two marked out Succession as the show that everyone was watching, with the series winning big at the 2020 Emmys, with prizes for acting, writing, best drama, and directing. The writers were also starting to see a marked change.But often, it’s something tiny, easy to miss, a minor detail that makes so much else make sense; a shred of lore that twists the knife or unscrews the cap on the poison that was already so potent; something that the actors were privy to all along. Like, in the third episode of Season 1, after Logan has survived an early health scare, Kendall looks around his dad’s office: He looks at the chair behind the desk. Sitting in it would be too much, right? Instead he sits on the desk like it’s a park bench. Closing his eyes he breathes in, as much as anything, to calm his own nerves. Contrast that with the show’s finale, in which Kendall has no such compunction about occupying the seat, even putting his feet up—an action that revolts his sister and helps set into motion her change of heart and vote. And speaking of his sister, she, too, has a stage direction that foreshadows the events of the finale. While there’s some true improv involved, too (“typically via a ‘freebie’ take” at the end, as Armstrong calls it in the book), he encourages that largely for the vibes. “To my mind, more important than the occasional improvised lines we capture is that this improvisational method infuses all the takes, on-script and off, with a spirit of freedom and collaboration,” he writes. (Still, some of those extemporaneous lines pop off, so to speak!) The result is scripted lines that sound off-the-cuff, with the occasional actual ad-libs blending seamlessly into the show’s tone.