Jesse Armstrong Explains ‘Succession’ Season 4 Finale Choice
The final draft of the show isn’t the script. It’s the version we air. My fellow writers and I always wrote and rewrote scripts with the knowledge that we could in safety try something a little more grayed-out and subtle, or a little odder, or a little more vivid and “red,” as Lucy Prebble would say in the room; knowing that if the execution on celluloid left something too opaque or too vivid we had a safety net. That we could dance closer to the precipice with the assurance that the final, final edit was yet to come. It’s a great freedom. Without the power American TV gives a showrunner, the temptation can be to write in a closed-off, invulnerable way with every scene sleek and sealed — less prone to misexecution or misinterpretation. And that’s a shame. Because I do think the cracks are where the light gets in — the bits of a show that elbow out at odd angles, the bones that stick in your throat.
What I always hoped for in the show was that sense of something you couldn’t look away from. Episodes that both demand the viewers’ full attention and were worthy of it. And that quality comes from the careful plotting in the room, and then careful writing and rewriting. But it also comes from what we choose to leave out. Because there’s a paradox about the core of a TV show, especially one that lives somewhere in the world of the satirical. If you don’t have anything you want to say, there’s a danger the show will never live. But at the same time, if you do have something to say, there’s a danger that if you ever state it, it will kill the whole endeavor, so it lies flat and dead, like a propaganda leaflet dropped in the street. What you have to do is trust that if you set things up right and hold the tone and create the universe correctly, you can step back from the mechanism, let it run, and say, as in Walter Benjamin’s useful but disingenuous declaration: “I have nothing to say, only things to show.”
An ancillary benefit of keeping yourself out of the show is that what you thought you were transmitting is not necessarily what people will receive. And that’s a good thing. People are hungry, especially right now perhaps, for things that are other than what they seem — characters and situations that are allowed to be multiple. We all have an impulse to want to pull the mask off the baddie and have something simple revealed — base truths and clear explanations. But that first reducing, simplifying impulse will likely never wholly satisfy because it offends our deep sense of what the world is really like.
Taking a hard look at the world as it is, that would be my definition of satire, I think. This might be a less lofty ambition than an older version where satire functioned — or was imagined to function — in a sort of dialectic relationship with power. The idea that things happened in the public-political arena, and were then critiqued and mocked, and that interaction provided a release valve or even pointed in the direction of an alternative — I’m not sure that was ever how it actually worked. But even the idea of that relationship feels falsely soothing now that the powerful and the satirists are all seeking attention in the same ring of the circus. Which doesn’t mean that the annual article, “Is satire dead?” is ever going to be more fresh. That article will forever be boring and wrong. But it does mean the satirical approach needs to come in at a different angle. It probably always does, every generation. Comforting the afflicted feels relatively straightforward. But afflicting the comforted? Maybe it will go better if you avoid announcing your intention too clearly at the door.