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 bonnet, 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 "meagreness" 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 3-D version, an origami of the watched, the heard and the read.
[su_unherd_related fttitle="Suggested reading" author="David Mamet"]https://staging.unherd.com/2023/09/will-hollywood-strike-back/[/su_unherd_related]
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, nothingy-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. 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.] 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 outwards: "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 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 dialling 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?"
[su_unherd_related fttitle="More from this author" author="Ian Martin"]https://staging.unherd.com/2022/08/the-beauty-of-british-rail/[/su_unherd_related]
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, signalling 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 hoovered 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 adduces 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 wise-cracking algorithms, programmed to variously have imposter syndrome, diffidence disguised as arrogance, arrogance disguised as diffidence, sundry neuroses, lurching random kindnesses and seven variants of panic? [su_unherd_related fttitle="Suggested reading" author="Nicholas Harris"]https://staging.unherd.com/2023/09/peep-show-is-a-national-humiliation/[/su_unherd_related] 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 Independent Television Authority was created, which ended the BBC's broadcasting monopoly, introduced ITV and ad breaks, and foreshadowed a 21st-century TV culture driven and riven by money. The fearsome 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 a Shakespearean tradition still has resonance? Logan Roy as Lear, at odds with his serially disappointing children. Kendall a method-acting Richard the Third, 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 telly on telly for years. And these scripts show why. Writing. What made it so great was the writing.
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SubscribeI enjoyed the author’s description of the creative process in a writing room. I’m surprised he didn’t tackle what currently seems to be the biggest threat to original, engaging TV and movies: progressivism and its handmaiden, cancel culture.
So far as I know, the author is mainly a comedy writer. I’m sure he’s aware of how tame, ideological, and utterly boring modern comedy has become because the censorious Left control much of the media. AI might be a future threat to scriptwriters and other creative folk, but left-wing ideology and censorship seems to be the current threat.
On the bright side, I recently read that most Disney movies flopped this year, and even the mighty Amazon, with its infinitely deep pockets, is now questioning why it’s spending money making movies that people don’t watch. I suggest the explanation for both failures is the movie makers are more interested in delivering DEI-inspired sermons rather than entertaining. So, to answer the question posed in the title of this article, if the entertainment business doesn’t move away from political correctness and toward original, edgy entertainment, then, yes, TV probably died with Succession.
AI will not replace great screenwriters. It will, however, replace mediocre screenwriters. I invite Unherd readers to take a look at the most recent World of Warcraft cinematic trailer. There are moments–long moments–when the illusion of reality is complete, when I had to remind myself I was seeing something that had been entirely created in a computer. This presages the end of film acting as a mainstream career, just as ChatGPT and other AIbots presage the end of writing as a mainstream career.
I predict that in ten years, the entire process of filmmaking will have been automated. AIs will draft screenplays and direct virtual actors with digitally created voices and images–and these tools will be available commercially, or have escaped into the digital ecosystem. Before you leave for work for the day, you’ll tell the virtual film studio that lives in your computer, “I want a buddy cop picture with about 75% humor and 25% intense action, starring these two virtual actors I’ve generated, with a token romance and a happy ending, similar to the last five action-comedies I’ve generated (plus or minus 5%), and I want it to run about two hours.” While you’re out, the thing will cook, and then when you get home, you’ll be able to park yourself in front of your monitor with your dinner and watch a bespoke popcorn movie that literally no one else on earth will ever have seen. It won’t be Citizen Kane, but it will very easily replace all the formulaic, by-the-numbers gimme pictures that Hollywood churns out every year.
Of course, there’ll still be a place for live actors, just as there’s a place for artisanal bread or handcrafted furniture. Mass-production didn’t eliminate those activities and it won’t eliminate creative activities, either. What will be eliminated will be the vast numbers of people who make their livings in the creative industry. The period of artist-as-capitalist, which began, more or less, with Charles Dickens, is coming to an end, and we’ll return to the premodern artist-as-hobbyist. People will write or act or paint or sing as they’ve always done, it’ll just be a lot more difficult to get paid for it–unless you’re exceptional, of course.
Spot on. I love the way AI is fumigating human mediocrity from our creative and information industries. If we’re to have creative mediocrity it might as well be robotic, it would free up more real humans to help out with the drudgery of service work. The human elements of that Warcraft trailer are eminently watchable, only marginally uncanny now. Throw in various porn and violence settings and a bespoke/to-order capacity – to say, make the bad guy look like your boss and give your ex-wife an unflattering cameo – and who needs a dozen B grade writers.
Think AI is coming for much of the drudge service industry too to be honest
Yup, it’s cheaper and more reliable.
James Cromwell’s delivery of that eulogy was a masterpiece.
I have rewatched Succession a few times, it’s so hard to let it go, though I haven’t bought the scripts. I enjoyed the essay enormously and endorse its insights. Thanks.
I don’t understand people who don’t get Succession, it’s like not ‘getting’ what it’s like being human. Humans aren’t knowable, they’re messy contradictions: Profoundly slippery and unanchored, wrongly suffering, wrongly proud. Ineffable. Of course we all want more, even knowing there isn’t any more. We are all splashing about in the shallows of life, only AI could imagine that we are more profound. Only humans know despair, defending hope to survive. Does AI ever feel guilty?
Same. Don’t get Succession; I don’t get you
There is a lot of this ‘AI will never..’ surety around right now. Strange to be so certain about the future limitations of something evolving at parabolic rate.
It is indeed quite chilling.
I enjoyed the article but Succession is a crashing bore of a program. A parade of awful characters bickering about who gets to be the most important? Yawn.
If I wanted that, I’d watch one of the presidential debates.
Or read Unherd threads! 🙂
Never heard of the show, Succession. But I spent Thanksgiving weekend binge rewatching “The Sopranos” and “Game of Thrones”. No AI could ever write either of those shows. AI is a genius-level psychopath. Imagine Hermann Goering, Lavrenti Beria, Ted Bundy and Albert Speer all inside the “mind” of the most powerful AI engine ever created. That engine could never write a single episode of the above.
I think The Sopranos blows GofT out of the water.
I just finished Succession season 4, and I was already wondering if they’d used AI to come up up with some of the dialogue. I especially loved one of Roman’s lines: “Tell them to stick their petrodollars up their human rights record”, which got a belly laugh from me, but it’s only one example of what’s a relentless stream of wit from many of the main characters. Or maybe a writers room can come up with twelve hours of dialogue in which every remark is a witty riposte or elegantly-crafted insult – I don’t know.
What I do know is that there remains a demand for television shows so stuffed with clever dialogue that they’re addictive, like Succession. Whether that gets delivered by the classic writer’s room, an ever improving AI or a combination of both, makes no difference: the demand for it will only increase.
Especially it we’re all at home watching TV because the robots are doing all the work.
TV, movies, ETC, started dying in the mid 1990’s of a combination of politics, finance algorithms, and corrupt politicians and bureaucrats.
Just like everything else.
…but they are still there.
Since we started watching Korean drama, Western shows seem coarse and mediocre in comparison.
Although the script of Squid Games seemed as if it was written by AI
Succession was overrated.The first series was the best and then after that it became a parody .Better shows in recent years were The White Lotus series 2 ,El Candidate (Amazon Mexican) Faking Hitler (all4) Gold (bbc)
Bronze Age TV is a bit much to hope for. We’re pretty much in the age of Plastic TV now.
Succession was like watching an amazing Broadway play every episode. The only show better is The Sopranos.
Personally I couldn’t stand Succession, thought it was terrible. I tried to get into it several times but it just annoyed me.
Same as that, the hammy acting and awful screenplay was cringeworthy.
It’s my belief that the liberal phenomenon that was “Succession” has laid the ground for the $1.5billion made across the globe by middle-class graduate audiences flocking to “Barbie”. Kind of like the naked Emperor being clothed on TV first before his big-screen puppet was released.
Straightforwardly, the bar was set so low by the shaky camera-work, flat characterisation and snarky inanities of said TV serial that an anti-conservative parable about a plastic corporate doll has cleaned up this year.
Not the Jamie Carragher?
Succession, White Lotus, Morning Show, Slow Horses, South Park etc there’s plenty of great writing talent around.
If humans are afraid of competition from AI maybe we just need to up our game a bit.
At the low end, formula, painting by numbers level, it can be generated. Is that such a bad thing? It sets a minimum threshold to be worth paying for.
Great piece. Thank you.
I’ve just finished a rewatch of the complete Sopranos by David Chase. And now I’m going to rewatch the whole of The Wire. Succession isn’t worthy of any mention at all alongside just those two, and many other HBO titles.In terms of tv/DVD series we live in a deprived era.
A cliché among clichés but I definitely believe that Telly isn’t dead, it just smells funny, as Frank Zappa said about jazz. It changed, it is changing, it’ll change, certainly shrink but will survive, even with or because of AI.
For all I remember my fondness for the first (and possibly second) series, ‘Succession’ succeeded only in becoming complete and utter drivel.
I find it’s a problem with most yank television, they always seem to drag it out too long rather than go out on a high
Harsh – but it did increasingly become a vehicle merely for enabling repetitive displays of the excessive and predictable character traits of the main characters. The plots also became more fanciful – especially to those of us with some knowledge of business. The score remained its best feature, and two series would have been plenty.