Series creator interviewed at the BBC Comedy Festival

They are, by most measures, truly awful, immoral human beings.

But Succession creator Jesse Armstrong says he doesn’t like to see the characters in his drama suffer – and would hate to think he’s being sadistic in putting them through the mill.

‘I  don't like the feeling of being sadistic to the characters,’ he told the BBC comedy festival in Cardiff yesterday. ‘But sometimes in the room we say, "What's the worst thing that can happen to these characters?" And by that, I mean, the funniest.

‘We put the characters through a lot. And I do like being unflinching in terms of looking at that but I wouldn’t want to be sadistic.  I don't feel sadistic towards them.  I feel empathetic.

‘Hopefully you see the full context for them. Most of them are pretty awful by most common standards – bad people who do terrible things to the world – and yet we see to a degree what makes them act that way.

‘People might see them more as caged beasts. These cages  are societal pressures, familial pressures, psychology…  I don't enjoy seeing them suffer. So I don’t know why I do it.’

The writer said he had mixed feelings ahead of the last episode, which airs in the UK on Monday, saying: ‘This bit is exciting. I’m obviously excited for the world to see the last episode. But then it starts getting increasingly sad as you stop seeing those people who you enjoy working with, especially writers.’

And he said he sometimes had to pinch himself at what he was able to do in the making of he show. ‘We had a civil disturbance in the last show and they managed to close down Fifth Avenue,’ he said incredulously.

Although usually billed as a drama, Armstrong noted Succession’s strong similarities to the sitcoms where he made his name.

‘You'll get more out of it if you watch it as a run [like a drama] but you should be able to watch each episode as a self-contained thing like e you might do a sitcom,’ he told interview Holly Walsh. ‘Oftentimes, our plots will be a sitcom thing like a party or a wedding. And I like that structure, I find it satisfying. That’s the way I think about plot. ‘

Armstrong also said he had to adapt to the US way of working following a career in the UK working on the likes of Peep Show and The Thick Of It.

‘The showrunner job is weird, because no one gives you a manual and no one tells you really what it is,’  he said. ‘I’m still a little bit scared HBO might come and say "You didn't fill out this form, we can’t put any of this out!"

‘[The job] becomes increasingly clear to you as you go on.  I guess the way it always appeared to me was you are the head writer. And I guess the the differences is that in the American system that division, has got institutionalised… so you are the person who goes into the edit, for example. And you greet the new directors and brief them and talk to them. So  you're the creative decider of anything.

‘But as I say, it is slightly uncodified so you can step away from bits which you're not so good at and maybe try to get more involved in the bits that you think you can do more good for.’

Succession came about after he wrote a pilot that got picked up, then he assembled a team of eight or nine writers, the usual American way.

But he noted. ‘I've always worked in collaboration in my TV career. Firstly, with Sam [Bain]  as  writing duo. And then on The Thick Of It with Armando [Iannucci], Simon [Blackwell] and Tony [Roche] so I liked that collaboration.’

He said one big advantage of the writers’ room was in fixing problems. ‘If you’re on your own, it can take a week, whereas if you've got a room, hopefully, for six people who are downcast there's one person who sees a way through. So it's like an accelerator.’

The team spent ‘four or five months’ in the writers’ room plotting the series and developing  the characters.

‘My credo was that you spend the first month doing whatever the fuck you want,’ Armstrong said. ‘And that's freeing.

‘It could be coming up with a little tiny joke about this character, or it could be asking what is the subtext for what is this series going to be.  What's going to be the last episode? What's going to be the ultimate feel and the shape of it?

‘A writers’ room is not a place to do any writing in.  Sometimes somebody says something that's funny that remains in the notes that we use. But it's not for writing, in my opinion,.’

He also explained that he apportions which of the team writes which episodes but that the decision was often ‘more logistical than creative’ because everyone should be able to write any instalment.

Speaking about rewriting those scripts, he said: ‘It's delicate. On The Thick Of It and other shows I've been in the position of having my stuff reworked by fellow writers. And it's been treated very delicately.

‘I try to talk about it when we first get together, because it's totally fine. Everyone knows that the show is the thing and that's what you're doing [making it as good as possible].  But [as a writer] you’re also attached to your work.

‘Everything does go through me as it has to have a consistency of tone. Once we have those drafts we go into production. I always make sure to have several of my writing colleagues around on set and watch the takes. Then I Retreat with a group or on my own to do rewrites and looking at the episodes ahead. We often do significant reworking.’

‘Some writers don’t want to be on set but if you had any desire to go to set then the producers and directors should welcome you.’

Armstrong - who said he was  a ‘militant flag-waver’ for writer-led shows rather than those dreamed up by producers or commissioners – added that writes on set made financial sense, as it  cut time spent sorting out problems

‘Occasionally the thing you see happening is a director and actor looking at a script saying ‘What do you think this means?'" So [the writer] should be part of the conversation.’

Walsh said she’d notice that despite the epic scale of Succession, for many crunch scenes the action was moved to a confined space, such as a private jet.

‘Comedy usually works in small spaces,’ Armstrong said, adding that there were other consideration as to where to set a scene too: ’Some of that is technically thinking "well this seems a bit boring maybe we've got a place a tray of pastries in there and everyone's looking at the pastries" that helps [to distract an audience]  if you don't know what a reverse takeover is.’

‘And you also you can't put everything in karaoke bar or a bowling alley or somewhere amusing like that but if you’ve got to set a businessy scene [as in doing some business of advancing the plot] able to enjoy the scene on multiple levels

He also spoke about he and Bain got their first break writing on kids’ shows such as The Queen's Nose and My Parents Are Aliens.

‘There are a fews place in the British TV industry, which are constantly making things. And if you can find yourself towards such places, whether it be soap or children's showI think the experience of feeling what narrative feels like what interests an audience…  it's just incredibly important to try and learn one's craft,’ he said.

Next was a ‘useful, disastrous  attempt to translate That 70 Show – which was an America  hit – into a UK show’.

‘It went very badly, it was good to learn,’ Armstrong said. ‘I remember looking at the monitor, going "I don’t think that looks very good. I imagine between that and [broadcast]  there'll be something that TV does. It won’t look like that." It’s a hard lesson to learn that if you are on set and it doesn't look right, there’s no magic machine.’

He explained that he first incarnation of Peep Show was based on Beavis and Butt-Head, the animated characters who would comment on music videos on MTV.

‘This was going to be like a really cheap format to have Dave [Mitchell] and Robert, [Webb] who were funny, watching TV. and talking shit about it.

‘Then we needed some interstitial  moments where they went to the kitchen and they're thinking things, and that was the first idea of it. Then the narrative part started to grow and grew and we made two 15-minute, quite inexpensive, pilots.

‘We had what was was probably characterised as "a woman in the office who Dave fancied" and they said "We should probably get Ollie to do it". And I was like fine bring your friend in, your funeral, guys. And that was Olivia Coleman…’

Published: 26 May 2023