Succession’s Jesse Armstrong Almost Didn’t Pick a New CEO

Jesse Armstrong never intended for you to empathize with the Roys. In a new interview with The New York Times, the Succession creator shared his thoughts and intentions regarding the “deeply unmoored” Roy family, potentially ending Succession without naming a successor, and the depiction of wealth on the program: “It’s making them sicker.”

Viewers had to wait till the final moments of Succession to find out whether Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook), or Roman (Kieran Culkin) would succeed their father Logan Roy (Brian Cox) as the head of the family empire. But while determining who would take over Waystar Royco was the driving action of the series, Armstrong says that he toyed with the idea of never answering that question and ultimately leaving viewers in the dark. “That would be the sort of question I might come into the writers’ room with, like, ‘What would it be like if we didn’t give a successor? Could that be interesting?’” he tells the Times. “Through a process of discussion with smart people, we were like, ‘No, that would be annoying. Let’s not do it.’ One of the reasons for ending the show is that it starts to become either ridiculous or annoying if you continually defer that decision.”

Armstrong admits that he never really intended for the viewer to empathize with Logan Roy and his progeny. “It was never really a consideration. That may be a defect in our working process,” says Armstrong. “Maybe I could try to elicit the audience’s sympathy for someone, but I wouldn’t want to with this show. It would just feel so fake.” While Succession may not be concerned with its audience empathizing with the Roy family, Armstrong goes onto elucidate what he believes the show really is about. “It’s a show with these particular familial dynamics and with this relationship to power and money,” he says. “Everything flowed from that.”

Audiences took to Succession despite or, more likely because of, all the horrible things Roys did over the course of show’s four seasons. After reaching its bleak conclusion on May 28th, Succession earned 27 Emmy nominations, including nods for all of the main cast as well as two for Armstrong for writing and executive producing the series. According to the Times, Armstrong is only just now sifting through reactions to the show.  “At the time, I kept my nose out of most of the reactions, because it wasn’t useful to know what people were thinking about the show. You can get a bit bent out of shape,” he says. “I like critics. I believe in criticism as an important part of keeping the cultural world going. But I didn’t look at a ton of stuff before the show ended.”

Now that the series is over, Armstrong can share that although Succession wasn’t designed to engender sympathy for the Roy family, he’s able to find “a lot of sympathy for the characters” when viewing them from a psychological perspective rather than an idealogical one. “The show takes more of a psychological view than a Marxist one. That’s the level at which I do have a lot of sympathy for the characters and I would hope that the audience does too,” he says. “They are pretty bad. They do bad stuff. But you see where they come from psychologically. That’s one of the tragedies of those kids’ lives.” 

“A lot of the spaces that these people inhabit, these five-star hotels and private plane interiors, it’s not actually a beautiful world,” he continues. “That came from the research. There’s not a lot of fun going on in those worlds. Everyone is constantly thinking of the press release rather than the pleasure. That didn’t come from a precept that great wealth won’t make you happy. It probably could do. But not for these people.”

Despite their obscene wealth, the Roys, it seems, were doomed from the start. “It’s a very particular world, right? It’s a portrayal of what is possible within the moral universe created by a business and a family. The possibilities are really circumscribed. But they exist. The intention is to show this world truthfully as possible,” Armstrong says. “One of the few more things they have is family, and it has that incredible magnetism for them. It’s like they’re hooking up constantly to an IV drip and they don’t realize that there’s a percentage of poison in the IV. It’s not making them better. It’s making them sicker.”