The Real C.E.O. of “Succession”

When Jesse Armstrong, the writer and creator of the HBO series “Succession,” arrived on set at Amerigo Vespucci Airport, in Florence, one morning in June, he was faced with an extravagant decision. The scene to be shot was from the first episode of Season 3, in which various members of the Roy family—the dysfunctional media dynasty whose power struggles the show acidly chronicles—have just disembarked from the yacht on which, in the Season 2 finale, they bobbed in gilded captivity. Two planes had been positioned together on the tarmac: a Boeing 737, rented at a price of more than a hundred thousand dollars, and a smaller Falcon business jet. Tracks had been laid for a dolly shot. The temperature was already climbing into the eighties, and a crew of more than two hundred people bustled about the runway, perspiring in high-visibility vests.

The scene hinged on a surprise. In the final moments of the previous episode, Logan Roy, the volatile patriarch, was aboard the yacht, watching a live stream of Kendall Roy, one of his four ambitious offspring, at a press conference in New York, where he had been sent to publicly shoulder the consequences of a scandal in the cruise-ship division of Waystar Royco, the family conglomerate. Instead of offering himself up as a sacrifice, however, Kendall had stuck the knife into his father. The new season, which begins airing in October, picks up the story moments later, with Logan, the rest of the family, and Logan’s most loyal executives still in Europe, calculating how to counter Kendall’s move.

“It’s a moment of indecision,” Armstrong said of the tarmac scene, above the drone of idling jet engines. Though the previous season ended with a closeup of an inscrutable smile on Logan’s face, “this is the moment at which you get the sense that Logan is worried.” In the new script, Logan chooses to divide his forces into two camps: one party will return to America while he and others fly elsewhere. Armstrong’s decision that morning involved the placement of the two rented planes, which airport staff had parked close together. As he put it to me, his concern was that having two planes visible at the outset of the scene would preëmpt the story: “I think a viewer’s sense would be: ‘They can all travel together on the big plane. So why is there a second plane?’ ”

An embarrassment of airplanes: a very “Succession” problem. The show, a word-of-mouth hit, is known for its faithful depiction of the bountiful resources and anesthetized habits of the very wealthy. On an excursion from the yacht in Croatia, Logan’s son-in-law, Tom Wambsgans, instructs the pilot of a small boat, “Next cove, please, Julius,” so that he and his wife, Shiv, can be ferried to a sublime coastal spot for the unhappiest picnic ever. Armstrong—whose display of personal indulgence, in spite of his professional success, so far extends only to showing up to the Season 3 writers’ room in an extremely nice blue cashmere sweater—is a good-natured stickler for verisimilitude. The playwright Lucy Prebble, who is one of the show’s writers, recalls “someone coming in and saying, ‘We can’t have two helicopters,’ and noting how many tens of thousands of dollars they cost, and Jesse just saying, in a really relaxed way, ‘I think we probably need two.’ ” “Succession” documents wealth but it does not fetishize it, with the possible exception of a backless wool turtleneck dress worn by Shiv in an episode of Season 2; the garment was so delectably impractical that it inspired a flurry of online shopping. In general, the show makes affluence look vaguely diseased, and emphasizes the ways in which even the very rich cannot be entirely insulated from the drudgery of inconvenience. Mark Mylod, who has directed close to half the episodes of “Succession,” and is also an executive producer, told me, “We try to find situations where the characters cannot control the world, whether the weather’s bad or they are stuck in traffic.” For last season’s finale, Mylod filmed scenes on the yacht in the middle of the day, beneath harsh, overhead sunlight, in order to make the characters seem uncomfortably exposed, physically and emotionally. When, in the same episode, Logan is obliged to conduct a humbling video call with one of his corporation’s major shareholders, it is not from the comfort of his Audi but, rather, from the grim patio of a service station on a busy highway.

At the Florence terminal, the drawbacks of private plane travel—being ferried in cramped vans to wait on a scorching, gritty, noisy airport apron, as opposed to sharing a large, air-conditioned terminal with commercial passengers—were identical to the drawbacks of shooting high-end television in an inhospitable location. The actors clutched their scripts while members of the hair-and-makeup team attended to them, attempting to keep sweat and grime in abeyance. Will Tracy and Tony Roche, two of the show’s writers, hid under a small awning, using their phones to read Armstrong’s script for a forthcoming episode. Given the prevailing discomfort, Armstrong had to weigh how much of a disruption it was going to be creatively, physically, and emotionally to preserve the revelation of a second plane. In consultation with Mylod, who was directing the episode, a decision was reached not to compromise narrative integrity: the Falcon would be towed out of sight. To Armstrong’s relief, a driver on a small white tug had removed the offending plane within fifteen minutes. “I thought it was going to be a huge deal to move a plane,” Armstrong told me, once the Falcon had been shunted aside. He sounded amused, even a little wondering. “But, luckily, it took just one little man.”

The table read of the pilot episode of “Succession” took place in Manhattan on November 8, 2016: Election Day. That evening, the cast and the rest of the team gathered at the home of Adam McKay—an executive producer of the show, and the director of the pilot—for a party that was expected to celebrate the victory of Hillary Clinton. Matthew Macfadyen, the British actor who plays Tom Wambsgans, told me, “We watched the results come in, and everyone wandered off into the night—good for storytelling, bad for humanity.” Armstrong’s most significant memory of the occasion was how quickly attendees accommodated to what initially seemed to be earth-shattering news. “It was such a shock—then five, ten minutes later, everyone’s living in a new reality,” he said. Even in calamity, he observed, many people are “quite oriented towards how it affects them, and what they will do next.”

The first episodes of “Succession,” which aired in the summer of 2018, established an elliptical relationship to contemporary reality: there would be no specific references to Trump. But, with the U.S. government turned over to a leader with a transparently chaotic, transactional, and rapacious nature, the show met the national mood. “Succession” would have been equally entertaining had Hillary Clinton become President, but it wouldn’t have felt so timely if it hadn’t appeared after the election of Trump—a candidacy championed by Fox News, whose core strategy of chasing ratings by spreading fear is not dissimilar to that of ATN, the news organization owned by Waystar Royco. The opening credit sequence of “Succession” includes a cheeky shot of an ATN news ticker; in Season 2, it reads, “gender fluid illegals may be entering the country ‘twice.’ ”

For some viewers, Armstrong’s thoroughgoing commitment to a curdled view of humanity—as the Roys jockey for position, they trade such endearments as “the cunt of Monte Cristo”—made the show at once intolerable and irresistible. “I hate everyone on ‘Succession’ and I can’t stop watching,” a typical headline read. The show is so unsettling, in part, because it offers no vantage points exterior to its scrupulously rendered universe—there is no outsider figure who is easier to identify with than the amoral protagonists. The Roy family’s outsider, Cousin Greg, is as calculating as any member of the clan with whom he seeks to ingratiate himself. Culture critics have popularized the term “wealth porn” to characterize shows, such as “Billions” or “Gossip Girl,” that lavish attention on the consumption habits of the absurdly wealthy. But, if the shiny surface of “Succession” bears a relation to pornography, it is less because it titillates than because it partakes of pornography’s deadening relentlessness.

“Succession” also withholds cheap catharsis. Kendall’s backsliding with drugs is only the most overt example of the show’s gothic sensibility: all the Roys have been poisoned by the toxic nature of the family fortune, and Armstrong refuses to impose on them the kind of artificial personal growth that fosters an easy bond with the audience. The closest that “Succession” has come to giving its characters a respite from their crabbed emotional confinement is when Kendall, at a particularly low ebb, begs Shiv for a hug. She awkwardly complies, but only after saying in astonishment, “Give you a hug?”

Given the care that Armstrong puts into making “Succession” a complex viewing experience, he is reluctant to explicate the show too much, as if it were reducible to a tidy set of themes and intentions. Nevertheless, his ambitions in “Succession” are driven not by a voyeuristic fascination with the rich—or by a righteous desire to expose the perfidies of inequity—but by a wish to tell, through the specific medium of a contemporary media dynasty, a more universal story about power and family relations, and to show how those forces can torque an individual’s humanity. It’s not so much “Billions” as “Buddenbrooks,” with more money and less grain. In one of a series of conversations during the making of Season 3, Armstrong told me, “One of the things that strikes me when I’ve read about these families—whether it be the Maxwells or the Redstones or the Julio-Claudians—is that, when you get that combination of money, power, and family relations, things get so complicated that you can justify actions to yourself that are pretty unhealthy to your well-being as a human being. Or you don’t even need to justify them, because the actions are baked into your being.” The infighting can become so darkly satisfying that it consumes one’s life: “For people who come from powerful families, there is nothing in life quite as interesting as being at court.” Indeed, almost nobody in a rich family steps away from the drama. “For these people to be excluded from the flame of money and power, I think, would feel a bit like death,” Armstrong said.

Armstrong’s interest in how human beings work—in what they say, and what they leave unsaid—is combined with a gift for comic dialogue that bounces from the demotic to the lewd to the baroque. Upon arriving at the family’s Hamptons estate, Logan demands that the doors be opened, noting, “It smells like the cheesemonger died and left his dick in the Brie.” When Cousin Greg is grilled at a congressional hearing, he responds to one question by saying, “Uh, if it is to be said, so it be, so it is”—a tortured circumvention of “Yes.” The uneasy simultaneity of comedy and drama that “Succession” depends on is a consequence of Armstrong’s unwillingness to save his characters from themselves. The writer and director Chris Morris, on whose recent movie “The Day Shall Come” Armstrong worked as a writer, told me, “Each of the characters in ‘Succession’ gives you the capacity to hope that they might snap out of the trap of their own existence. Jesse is the perfect sadist, because he is horrible to each one in turn, and yet he offers the audience just enough to hope that the characters might this time not disgrace themselves in the way that we kind of know they will. It is basically like a cat playing with a mouse and not killing it.”

A certain pitilessness, Armstrong told me, is not a bad thing for a work of fiction to have. “How can you be true about human beings?” he said. “That is a preoccupation.” He went on, “Without getting too highfalutin, there’s that quote from Marx, in ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,’ where he says men and women make their own history, but not the circumstances of their own making.” (The original text is less taut: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”) Armstrong continued, “For me, a lot of the art and the work of the show is in that territory between what’s history in the broadest sense, what’s family history, what’s tradition, and what’s the room for one’s own choices, and your own making of your life and your world. And there’s a gap there, which that mysterious thing about human personality fills.”

Whether Armstrong is on set at one of the foreign locales that give “Succession” its glossy atmosphere of sterile, moneyed internationalism or at Silvercup Studios in Queens—where the set of Logan Roy’s Fifth Avenue apartment, modelled on the mansion owned by the Council on Foreign Relations, is maintained—he is “like the mayor of a small town,” Jon Brown, a writer for the show, told me. Brown recalled, “I was in his office one day, and he was trying to write an episode, and someone came in and said, ‘Jesse, the caterers have made an ice sculpture, and they would like you to come and look at it,’ and Jesse had to put his episode down to go and look at it. He has these civic duties to keep everyone happy.”

When Armstrong is not issuing the equivalent of mayoral proclamations, he works in a rented room in a converted department store in Brixton, a neighborhood in South London. The office is spacious and airy but modestly equipped, with a wall of bookshelves and a teakettle on a side table. He keeps a carton of milk on the window ledge outside, like a student. “It feels a bit profligate having a whole fridge just for one pint of milk,” he said when I visited. His desk faces a window that overlooks a commuter railway. When I remarked that the clatter of passing trains must distract him, Armstrong looked surprised, as if he’d never noticed it before. “If you’d asked me if I could hear the trains from my office, I would have told you, ‘I don’t think so,’ ” he said. “I’d be a terrible—or brilliant—estate agent.”

Armstrong, who is fifty, has a scruff of salt-and-pepper beard that comes and goes, intelligent brown eyes that he often closes in concentration when speaking, and a measured voice that is lightly inflected with the accent of Shropshire, in the West Midlands, where he grew up. He is as affable as the characters on “Succession” are disagreeable. Prestige TV is prime territory for assholery, and the writers’ rooms of some of the best shows of recent decades have been arenas for conflict. Matthew Weiner, the creator of “Mad Men,” was called “an emotional terrorist” by a former writer on the show. (“I was a very demanding boss,” he later told the New York Times.) When Aaron Sorkin, the creator of “The West Wing,” was accused of yelling at a female writer on his HBO series “The Newsroom,” he responded that writers’-room arguments are “not only common, they are encouraged.”

This is not Armstrong’s style: he prefers to engender creativity with stability. “I’ve never seen him lose his temper,” Jon Brown told me. The show employs ten staff writers, half of them British and half American, and, unusually for a comedy, there is a roughly equal proportion of men to women. Even when the show has been in production and Armstrong, in addition to his other duties, has been writing the final two episodes of the season, he has remained equanimous. Brown recalled, “When we were in Scotland filming last season, there was a time when he asked me and Tony Roche to stop talking, so he could concentrate. Me and Tony were, like, ‘Fucking hell, someone’s grumpy.’ And then, in an hour, Jesse was, like, ‘You can talk again.’ ”

Francesca Gardiner, one of the writers of Season 3, said of her boss, “He’s sort of cool-dorky.” Armstrong bakes. He’s been a vegetarian—with occasional excursions into fish—since his youth. He met his wife, who works for the National Health Service, when they were in college, at the University of Manchester. They have two children and have lived in the same unflashy part of South London for almost three decades. When I asked if he had plans to upgrade his domestic space, he said, “We might do a new kitchen. So that will be corrupting.” Jeremy Strong, who plays Kendall Roy, told me, “I think it was Flaubert who said, ‘I want to live the quiet, ordered life of the bourgeoisie so that I can be violent and original in my work.’ That’s Jesse.”

Meticulous research goes into making “Succession” feel true to the rarefied world it portrays. What kind of overcoat would Logan Roy wear? A trick question: a mogul being perpetually shuttled from corner suite to climate-controlled limousine to luxury apartment doesn’t need an overcoat, no matter how cold it gets. Each of the staff writers is tasked with exploring a different dimension of the “Succession” world—which is, Armstrong acknowledges, overwhelmingly white and privileged. “We are working to reflect the world as it is, and not as we would wish it to be,” he said. “There’s another sort of show in which edging the world a bit towards what one would want it to be doesn’t hurt the show at all, whereas our show is critical-satirical—we need to portray that very particular and very powerful bit of the world it is concerned with quite precisely.” Last season, it fell to Susan Soon He Stanton to conduct an inquiry into the ministrations provided by the staff of a luxury yacht. She reported back that attendants wipe specks of powder from the rim of a guest’s makeup compact and print out copies of the daily newspapers every morning, as if they had been freshly fetched from a terrestrial newsstand. Jon Brown took a deep, if not hands-on, dive into the kind of élite sex club that serves as the setting for Tom Wambsgans’s bachelor party in Season 1. In an early draft of the scene, Brown incorporated an incident that he’d learned about during his investigations, in which an orgy room’s music speakers failed, making the slapping sound of flesh on flesh wetly audible. “After about one second, someone shouted, ‘Put the fucking music on,’ because even they didn’t want to hear how disgusting it was,” he told me. Armstrong decided to spare Tom that particular degradation, perhaps because he would soon put him through a humiliation that deliberately echoes the kind of sadistic jokes Josef Stalin used to play on party guests. At a dinner at a corporate retreat in Hungary, Logan, determined to stop leaks to the press, invents Boar on the Floor, a game in which executives suspected of betrayal are forced to crawl and chase sausages on the parquetry. “No half-hearted oink!” he demands.

As background for “Succession,” Armstrong and his writers loyally read the Financial Times, and they have plowed through a library’s worth of media biographies. They took a close look at “Crime and Punishment,” in order to deepen their depiction of Kendall’s inner turmoil, and consulted histories of ancient Rome in the hope that understanding the relationship between Nero and his freedman Sporus—whom the Emperor commanded be castrated, before undergoing a sham marriage ceremony with him—might illuminate the dynamic between Tom and Cousin Greg. The show has also hired such literary consultants as Gary Shteyngart, the novelist whose 2018 book, “Lake Success,” also depicts the lives of the super-rich in New York; among other things, Shteyngart discussed with the “Succession” team the delusionary psychology of hedge funders who are convinced that their wealth will protect them from the consequences of climate change. Tom Holland, the author of wide-lens books about ancient and medieval history, spoke about Caligula and other dissolute Roman leaders.

Last year, Brown told me, Armstrong came into the writers’ room with a big notion about the Epic of Gilgamesh. “I am fucked if I have any idea what the Epic of Gilgamesh is,” Brown said. “But if it makes you feel like you deserve your Emmy a little more, knock yourself out.” Armstrong assured me, “I have not read the Epic of Gilgamesh. I have probably listened to an ‘In Our Time’ podcast about it.” This lapse notwithstanding, Armstrong is a serious reader. Once, when I asked him which books he’d read recently, he mentioned the memoirs of Jack Straw, the Labour Party politician who served as a Member of Parliament and as Lord Chancellor; Robert Draper’s book about the run-up to the Iraq War; “A Little History of Poetry,” by John Carey; and the short stories of Jean Stafford.

Armstrong is disciplined not only in his reading. At the outset of writing Season 3, he started taking early-morning swims at Brockwell Lido, an unheated outdoor pool in London; as winter closed in, he updated his collaborators with slightly smug daily reports about the increasingly frigid water temperatures. Certain aspects of Armstrong’s work habits suggest a need to exert control. In the fall of 2019, the writers’ room for Season 3 was set up in a modern office building in Victoria. Dismayed to discover that he could not personally adjust the thermostat, Armstrong drew a picture of one set to 21.5°C—about 70°F—and put it on the wall. “You are meant to have a slightly cooler room for comedy,” he told me. “Standups always like the room cold, and if you’re shooting a sitcom live you want it a little bit chilly for the audience. I don’t know why—you’d have to ask a combination of an evolutionary psychologist and a building-maintenance man.” The room in Victoria also lacked a clock, and so, on a whiteboard featuring charts denoting each character’s development episode by episode, Armstrong drew a clock set to 2:25 p.m. It’s a hopeful time of day for a TV writer, he told me, since the room officially wraps up at 3:30 p.m.: “It’s almost there—not painful, watch-checking time, but nice to be toward the end of the day.”

When the show is in development, Armstrong’s preferred practice is to begin the day with each writer, in turn, giving an account of what she or he did the previous night, a process that can last as long as an hour. Will Tracy told me, “We go round the room clockwise, and everyone says what they ate for dinner, what bad movie they watched on TV, how much sleep they got—the more mundane, the funnier and better. At first, I thought this was very odd, but I immediately noticed that it bonded the writers—we developed a kind of group rapport very quickly.” Tracy went on, “And then all kinds of stuff from those evening recaps weaseled their way into the show. Someone will mention something about a friend who lived on Staten Island and had to commute into New York, and all of a sudden there’s a little line in the script about how Greg is living on Staten Island, and he’s coming in on the ferry every day and it’s a nightmare.” (A sneer from Tom: “Dude, why stop at the ferry? Just come in from Cleveland on the Greyhound.”)

Personal preoccupations, or nuggets of family history, find their way into the scripts, along with the writers’ research. The unfolding disaster of “Sands”—the dreadful play written by Willa Ferreyra, the girlfriend of Logan’s eldest son, Connor Roy—is informed by Armstrong’s impatience with the experience of theatregoing. “I am almost phobic about fearing that I am going to be bored, and in the theatre it’s a bit rude to leave, so I find that increases my anxiety about being bored to high levels,” he told me. The story line is enhanced by the presence in the writers’ room of some acclaimed playwrights, including Lucy Prebble and Susan Soon He Stanton. When, in an episode partially written by Stanton, Shiv meets Logan for a post-theatre supper and asks him how he enjoyed the play, his weary reply is “You know—people pretending to be people.”

When I visited the writers’ room after hours one afternoon in late 2019, I peeked at the whiteboards, along with other visual evidence of the group’s creative discussions, such as photocopied images of paintings, by Goya and Rubens, of Saturn devouring his son. There was a chart documenting a group competition to predict the results of the recent U.K. general election, which had secured Boris Johnson’s position as the country’s Prime Minister (to the dismay of the liberal intelligentsia of London, among other constituencies). The clear winner was Armstrong, who had predicted a Conservative margin of victory far greater than even the most pessimistic of his collaborators thought possible. “One of the privileges of doing a show like this is that you are able to think about the world with some other smart people,” he told me. “Do you know that W. H. Auden quote—‘Poetry makes nothing happen’? To some extent, poetry can stand in for this kind of work as well. I don’t suppose it is going to have any direct influence on the world. But it is still a way of being in it, and feeling like you are part of it, instead of entirely being acted upon.”

More than a decade before Armstrong wrote the pilot of “Succession,” he was commissioned to write a documentary-style teleplay set at a family dinner party celebrating Rupert Murdoch’s eightieth birthday. That project didn’t get far off the ground, but it did come to the attention of Frank Rich, the former New York Times columnist who is now an HBO producer. That and other Armstrong scripts impressed the network enough to green-light “Succession,” which takes inspiration not only from the Murdoch dynasty but also from other media families, including the Maxwells and the Redstones. Among Armstrong’s unmade but most admired projects is a bio-pic of Lee Atwater, the scabrous Republican strategist who helped elect George H. W. Bush to be Ronald Reagan’s successor as President. “It’s morning in America . . . and I tell you what, I have morning fucking wood,” Armstrong’s Atwater announces on page 1. Rich described the script to me as “a history of right-wing politics up to that time, with a comic touch,” adding, “I couldn’t believe this British writer could write such a compelling piece about American politics.”

At first glance, it might seem surprising that “Succession”—a show saturated in knowing detail about Manhattan, even if it is concerned with a global corporate business—was conceived by a British showrunner and is the product of a writers’ room in London. The Roys, though, have British roots: Logan is from a working-class Scottish background, and the mother of the younger Roy children, Caroline, is a frosty English aristocrat. Armstrong told me that in considering Caroline’s class background he had in mind someone like Lady Caroline Blackwood, the author and the daughter of the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, who was married to both Robert Lowell and Lucian Freud. The barb-trading discourse of the family, and also its aversion to the expression of emotion, are recognizable as culturally inherited traits. When Kendall visits his mother and tries to confide in her late one night, she recommends that they wait until morning, so they can talk “over an egg,” then scarpers before he rises. Brian Cox, who plays Logan—and who, like his character, was born in Dundee, Scotland—has an apartment in London, and when I met him at a café in Primrose Hill he told me, “The show has a kind of Swiftian satire. It’s in the vibe of this country.”

The “Succession” scripts are peppered with the type of memorably lurid cursing that another British writer, Armando Iannucci, helped make a hallmark of HBO, with “Veep.” Armstrong has a rule: an insult “should be at least as expressive of who the character uttering it is as it is eloquent, or ineloquent, about its target.” At one point, Kendall warns Stewy, a onetime school friend turned business rival, “I will come to you at night with a razor blade, and I will cut your fucking dick off”; Stewy airily replies, “And then push it up your cunt until poo-poo pops out of my nose hole.” But the show’s linguistic ingenuity extends well beyond scatology. The characters in “Succession” often employ weirdly original turns of phrase, as if they were generating on the spot the inventive speech of an individual caught between two cultures. When Tom learns that Cousin Greg is driving his grandpa from Canada to New York, he taunts, “Canada? With the health care and the ennui?” When the mischievous Roman Roy returns from a brief corporate posting in the sticks, he gives Logan’s butler an almost Falstaffian greeting: “Hail, my fellow toiler man, I have returned from real America, bearing the gift of sight.”

Will Tracy told me, “Jesse has a very particular kind of phraseology for the way people speak—even particular obscenities or analogies. The characters will use a kind of dialogue that makes me think, I’ve never really heard somebody speak that way. But it feels real, and not like a TV writer writing a line of what feels like dialogue.” Tracy, who is American, recalled that, when he first heard certain phrases in the writers’ room, he assumed that they were Britishisms. “But it turns out they are just Jesse-isms,” he said. “Like, he’ll say, ‘Tom is completely freaking out—he’s completely shit his whack.’ I said, ‘Is that a British thing?’ Jesse said yeah, but Tony and Georgia and Jon said no. Jesse thought that it was a thing.” The phrase will be introduced to the lexicon in an upcoming episode.

Armstrong has been interested in America since he was a teen-ager growing up in Oswestry, a market town on the border with Wales. His father, David, was a high-school English teacher who later turned to writing crime fiction; his mother, Julia, worked at nursery schools. Armstrong told me, “Oswestry’s a bit in the middle of nowhere—quite tough, and quite English, in the way border towns are.” In 2013, he made a short film, “No Kaddish in Carmarthen,” centered on Gwyn, a fifteen-year-old Welsh high schooler with a fascination for Woody Allen, who adopts black-rimmed non-prescription glasses and claims to be Jewish. “Mam’s a Methodist,” Gwyn says. “It’s the same thing—it’s similar.” Armstrong calls the film a “short-story version of an element of my youth.” His parents were gently countercultural, in a health-food-and-alternative-energy kind of way; they were also eager to expose Armstrong and his younger sister, who is now a graphic designer, to the world beyond their provincial town, with family trips to Greece and Tunisia.

In the spring of 1990, Armstrong and a friend took a budget trip to New York City, where they crashed on the couch of some Cooper Union students whom Armstrong had met while backpacking in Europe. “We walked around and had the tops of our heads blown off, just seeing what the city was like,” Armstrong told me. Upon returning home, he matriculated at the University of Manchester, ninety minutes northeast of Oswestry. He chose the university partly because it had an excellent American Studies department, and partly because the city had a vibrant cultural scene, with the celebrated Haçienda night club having hosted such bands as the Smiths and New Order. “When I was choosing where to go to university, we used to try to go to the Haçienda, and we were always turned away,” Armstrong said. “I felt like if I went to the university I could try more frequently, at least.”

As part of his degree, Armstrong spent a year at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Student life there was bracingly political in a way that Manchester at the time was not, and Armstrong contributed to the school’s daily newspaper. But rural Massachusetts felt much less sophisticated. “I’d never before seen people carrying around four cans of beer, like they’d captured some amazing trophy,” he recalled. He drew on the experience of his year abroad for an unrealized dramatic-comedy script in which two friends—a nerdy white guy from UMass and an affluent Black graduate of Amherst College—pool their resources to buy a cocoa plantation in a fictional African country, planning to make bespoke chocolate for American hipsters.

After college, Armstrong worked for two years in Westminster, London’s political district, as an assistant to Doug Henderson, a Member of Parliament and the shadow minister of home affairs for the opposition Labour Party. “We had a weirdly broad brief—everything from the Channel Islands to dangerous dogs to asylum and immigration,” Armstrong recalled. He did not take to the corridors of power; at the 1996 Labour Party conference, held in Blackpool, he so dreaded the prospect of schmoozing at parties that he spent his evenings feeding coins into video games at the amusement arcades on the pier. He was less interested in exercising influence and more interested in noting the quirks of those who held it, such as Ann Widdecombe, a right-wing politician whose office had two posters on display: an anti-abortion image of a fetus, and an image of Garfield, the cartoon cat, bearing the legend “If you want to look thinner, hang out with people fatter than you.” Armstrong told me, “She didn’t mean them to relate to each other, but to see them together was intriguing.” Though he disliked Westminster, the experience helped him as a writer on “The Thick of It,” a profane satire of British politics created by Armando Iannucci.

At the University of Manchester, Armstrong had become close friends with Sam Bain, a classmate from a creative-writing course. Bain, a privately educated Londoner, told me that he was interested by Armstrong’s quite different background. “He wrote one short story that had a character working on a building site,” Bain said. “It took me a while to realize that it was based on his own experience.” After Armstrong abandoned politics, he and Bain began regularly collaborating on comedy scripts. Armstrong discovered that having a writing partner was an amenable way to live. “There’s this third entity, Bain & Armstrong Industries, so, when you stop work and go home, you feel more like you’ve gone home from work than you do when you are working solo,” Armstrong said. “And you have got somebody who is exactly as interested as you are in your career.”

Their first big show, a British reboot of the U.S. sitcom “That ’70s Show,” was a flop. But in 2003 they had a breakout success as the co-creators and principal writers of “Peep Show,” a sitcom about sad-sack flatmates: Mark, a bank-loan officer, and Jeremy, a failed musician. The scripts, instead of featuring snappy dialogue, were anchored by the interior monologues of the two protagonists, from whose perspective scenes were often shot. The show, which ran for nine seasons, is widely considered to be a British comedy classic; Chris Morris told me that Armstrong and Bain became known as “the ultimate word in flawed male psychology.” One celebrated episode is predicated on Armstrong’s aversion to theatre: Mark is drafted to join Jeremy on a double date to a low-budget play, and they endure the experience as if undergoing a dreadful medical experiment. “When do we get to go out?” Jeremy whispers to Mark as they sit between their dates. Mark, looking crucified, replies, “As far as I can make out, we get to go out for a bit in an hour, and then we have to come back for two hours.”

Armstrong’s background in half-hour comedies can be detected in the economy of the “Succession” scripts, and in the premium the show places on keeping things lively. “I still think a half hour of comedy is the most intensive form of writing you can do,” he said. Kieran Culkin, who plays Roman, told me that Armstrong is allergic to shtick: “If it’s just a little bit—half an inch—too far-leaning into something, he’s going to catch it. On any other show, people would be, like, ‘Oh, that’s funny, let’s do that.’ And he’ll always be the voice of reason: ‘Yes, it’s funny, yes, it’s great, but it doesn’t work.’ ”

Armstrong rejects the privileging of drama over comedy, and happily calls “Succession” a satire. But the characters are far more complicated individuals than are likely to be found in a sitcom; their stunted interiority is explored with a combination of empathy and dispassion. Such nuance is possible, in no small part, because of the actors playing these roles. Brian Cox is a Shakespeare veteran, as is Sarah Snook, who told me that playing Shiv had helped her understand the role of Cordelia, in “King Lear,” rather than the other way around. “I felt like I understood the weight of familial responsibility, and the love and compassion a daughter can have for a father and leader, though he may be difficult,” Snook said. Jeremy Strong approaches Kendall with an immersive rigor, not with the audience-pleasing instincts of a standup. Strong told me that, during the filming of the pilot, he asked Armstrong at one point whether they could spend some extra time exploring Kendall’s history. “Jesse said, ‘Let me sit with this for a minute,’ and I went and got some lunch, and then twenty minutes later I got an e-mail entitled ‘Window Rumination.’ It was a fully realized monologue—a memory he’d created of Kendall visiting the office when he was six years old. He was like this little prince in the office, and everyone was adoring of him and smiling, and he kind of wandered off a little too far, and there was this huge guy, a security guard, who didn’t know who he was, and it sort of escalated, and this six-year-old Kendall was powerless and tongue-tied, until his father came and found him. It was a poignant and beautiful piece of writing, and, to me, central to this character’s struggle and experience—being lost in this oceanic moment and being saved by his father’s embrace.” The scene didn’t make it into the pilot, “but it’s all embedded,” Strong told me. “It was an amazing experience of finding this character together.”

Armstrong told me that his ability to empathize with the Roys’ flaws is likely connected to his having reached an age at which “you’re more aware of the tragic things that can happen to yourself, and other people.” He went on, “So-called dark or serious things can still be funny, but, as you get older, more terrible things happen to more people you know. The things you laughed at as a young person—you’d better be careful, because they could happen to you tomorrow. With jokes about old people wearing nappies, or infirmity—what are you laughing at? It’s going to be you, or your mum and dad, tomorrow. There’s nothing funny about that, and, if you think there is, you had better wonder about who is the subject of that joke.”

In early 2020, when it became clear that the filming of Season 3 would not begin that April, as planned, Armstrong hunkered down in South London. Around that time, he wrote me an e-mail that captured the tenor of the city: “Panic buying is still at the embarrassed, English, ‘what, I always buy this many lentils’ stage.” He told me that it remained to be seen whether current events would make it into the show “as a whiff or a stench.” By the spring, the crisis had come into darker focus: Mark Blum, the actor who played the cruise-division executive Bill Lockhart in Seasons 1 and 2, had died from covid-19 in New York City.

Weeks of delays turned into months. HBO executives were telling him to wait, Armstrong reported, “rather than have Logan do a series of Webinars we can put out on HBO Max.” During the course of the next few months, the show’s executive producer, Scott Ferguson, figured out the logistics of layering a covid-19 safety unit on top of the regular production crew, at a cost of millions of extra dollars. Production finally resumed, in New York City, in November. In the end, Armstrong decided not to incorporate the pandemic into the plot. This time, the characters’ habitual jetting around may seem even more exorbitant than usual.

The sequence at the Florence airport was filmed late in the shoot—an aberration. Armstrong prefers to film “Succession” in order. Although he begins the first day of production with a firm idea of where his characters will end up, their precise route is adjusted and refined along the way. In Florence, some dialogue was written on the spot, under the awning.

The dates of the airport shoot were dictated by location choices for the concluding episodes, which were to be set in the Tuscan countryside and around the Northern Italian lakes—landscapes of such loveliness that even the pitiless eye of Mark Mylod would have a hard time remaining jaundiced. At the Florence airport, Ferguson told me, “Quite honestly, I think every season Jesse has wanted to go to Italy. He also wanted a yacht the first season. So last season we got the yacht, and Italy is the second white whale.”

In Italy, Armstrong was showing a tentative degree of confidence that the season would achieve what he had hoped for it. At the airport, we went into a hangar and retired to what he referred to as his “office”: a solitary chair set up by a wall. “With any project, you go through waves of anxiety,” he told me. “I had moments of ‘Fuck, did we ever say that thing that we intended to say?’ ” He went on, “They say sometimes tennis players can see the ball quite big, and they feel like everything feels full of opportunity, and sometimes it will feel small, and nothing’s coming together. Sometimes you feel, ‘Oh, yes, I can do this, and now I can go there, and this sets up this.’ That sense of ‘I think I know what everyone’s thinking—I can see this room is full of all these people, and they all have their own perspectives, and I can feel them all.’ Then it feels full of possibility. I’m just wandering around the party, hearing what Gerri’s saying to Karl. That’s a fun feeling.”

For the scenes shot in Tuscany, Armstrong wanted to play with the E. M. Forster version of the region—or, at least, with the visual fantasies promulgated by the popular Merchant Ivory film adaptation of “A Room with a View.” He said, “I just felt it was a fun thing that British people do—that relationship to Tuscany, and those British vibrations of quite complicated snobbery about an area that has a certain resonance of cultural value for the British.” Even if American viewers didn’t pick up on all the ways in which “Succession” smuggles observations about British class into the narrative, he said, they would respond to the depiction if it rang true.

Armstrong hadn’t had much time to himself since arriving in Florence, he said, though he had taken a walk from his hotel to visit the Palazzo Vecchio, which in the sixteenth century was the seat of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici. With international tourism all but halted, the exquisite city, marked by monuments to the dynastic powers that held sway five hundred years ago, was quieter and emptier than it had been in decades. Armstrong joked, “It’s a little bit Logan Roy—‘Close Florence, I’m coming through.’ ”

After two days at the airport, the production moved south, to the Val d’Orcia. Hundreds of crew members were scattered around villas and in hotels in various small towns. Armstrong landed in Pienza, a hilltop settlement built according to Renaissance principles of town planning at the order of Pope Pius II, a scion of Sienese nobility. Pienza’s narrow pedestrian streets were scented with jasmine and pecorino, and its museums, former palazzi overlooking the valley, were empty. In the evening, the piping voices of a handful of Italian children playing in the town square echoed against the travertine façade of the cathedral. Then, when the clock struck eleven, a nationwide curfew began, and the town fell as silent as it would have been in the dark of a fifteenth-century night.

The first day in the Tuscan countryside, a scene from the penultimate episode was being shot, featuring Sarah Snook and Matthew Macfadyen as Shiv and Tom. The setting was Bagno Vignoni, an ancient spa settlement, and showed the couple seated at a café, then walking together around a sixteenth-century bathing pool in the center of the village. It was a successor scene, Armstrong told me, to their brutal picnic in the final episode of Season 2, in which Tom confesses to Shiv, “I wonder if the sad I’d be without you would be less than the sad I get from being with you.” Armstrong said, “I saw this as ‘What’s the next accommodation they will come to?’ It’s an intimate scene in which they either are frank with each other or appear to be trying to be frank with each other.” The scene also harked back to the Season 1 finale, set on the couple’s wedding night, in which Shiv belatedly tells Tom that she wants an open marriage, and ventures as close as she ever has to emotional honesty: “Love is, like, twenty-eight different things, and they all get lumped in together in this one sack, and there’s a lot of things in that sack—it needs to get emptied out. There’s fear, and jealousy, and revenge and control, and they all get wrapped up in really nice fucking wrapping paper.”

As the crew arranged the scene, readying extras and setting tables, Armstrong, leaning against a honey-colored wall, said, “That’s what’s interesting about the people in the show—hopefully, they are not incapable of honesty.” He went on, “Shiv is a passionate, driven, smart person, who I think occasionally gets glimpses of the way that her life could be integrated and whole and truthful. But they’re really hard to keep hold of, especially when they brush up against other people. And, like the other characters in the show, she hasn’t got very good facilities for compromise, or for taking into account other people’s feelings.” This was a moment, he said, in which his preferred Marxist lens—men and women make their own histories, but not the terms of their own making—proved useful as a way of situating the personal within the sociological. He observed, “We are all individuals with our own psychological makeup and impulses, and yet we find ourselves in vises of social and economic situations, which means that we are bent in and out of shape—and we’re bent out of shape by the psychologies of our families. So navigating the space between those—that you can act outside of your material interests, but will you?—that is a good area for where the conflict between human beings happens.”

As part of his background research for shooting in the area, Armstrong had been reading “War in Val d’Orcia,” the 1947 memoir of Iris Origo, the daughter of an American diplomat and Anglo-Irish aristocrat. Born in 1902, Origo, who became a biographer, was reared by her mother in a Medici palace in Florence, and married a member of the Italian nobility. In the twenties, the couple moved to La Foce, an estate in the Val d’Orcia. Origo’s memoir chronicles, in diary form, the effects on the region of the advent of the Second World War, during which Origo and her husband took in children who had been evacuated from the cities and also housed fifty British prisoners of war.

In reading the book, Armstrong had been struck—just as he had been after the table read of the “Succession” pilot, in November, 2016—by how quickly people adapt to altered conditions: a change in political circumstance; the onset of a pandemic; even the encroaching horrors of war. “There’s a moment when Mussolini is deposed, in 1943, and there’s a sense of hope—the Allies are coming, and it feels like it might be the day after tomorrow. But there’s still two more years of the war to go, and Iris Origo doesn’t know it,” he said. He had momentarily pulled down the face mask that covered his nose and mouth, in order to speak more clearly. “It’s just very human, that thing of adjusting yourself to a new position,” he went on. “Within seconds, the new world feels completely real and vivid, and you’re very quickly accommodated to it.” Then Armstrong raised his mask as he was called back to a video monitor, to watch another take. Snook and Macfadyen artfully interacted, with subtle variations in tone: more or less playful callousness on the part of Shiv, more or less submerged hurt and anger on the part of Tom. The characters moved and adjusted to their opulent constraints, in an evolving struggle whose conclusion—arriving in a future season—Armstrong had imagined but had yet to write. ♦