Jesse Armstrong and Lucy Prebble tell Andrew O’Hagan about crafting the satire of the century. Andrew O’Hagan: For the past 10 years, probably the most important show that has appeared on television has been Succession : beautifully written, beautifully acted, beautifully conceived, and endlessly inquiring about the nature of the world that we’re living in - and that great sort of disaster that has been the media’s influence in our everyday lives. It’s a moral inquiry.
Was it a political show from the beginning? Lucy Prebble: One of the things that we’ve learned over time, if you look at what came in over the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, is that news programming - at Fox, for example - has had a greater impact on the polarisation of America than almost anything else. And so it’s impossible to write a story about a family that manages a business similar to that without being political. Jesse Armstrong: Initially, there was an idea for a documentary, which was very much about Rupert Murdoch and his actual family.
That idea went away, 15 years ago, as one of those many projects that just don’t get made in film and TV. And then when Sam Bain and I had finished writing our sitcom Peep Show , I was thinking about the next thing. I read quite a lot about Sumner Redstone, and quite a bit about Robert Maxwell.
It made me think you’d have this tremendous freedom if you weren’t writing about these people - once you broaden the canvas, y.