Succession, an HBO series, was a big winner at the Golden Globes this year. Not only did it win for Best Television Series – Drama, co-stars Sarah Snook and Jeremy Strong also won the Golden Globe for their portrayals of sister and brother Shiv and Kendall Roy in the Best Supporting Actress and Best Actor categories.                                                                                                                
When Succession returned for its third season on HBO this fall, the story picked up where it left off: Kendall Roy, one of the four grown Roy children who fight for the throne of their father’s company, Waystar RoyCo, decided to challenge his father publicly and go to war with his family. The third season is a power game between the two – they move around each other rather like in a chess game, and it is about creating allegiances when convenient and breaking them when not.
While the family members each seek to position themselves in the best ways possible in the power game, someone is constantly waiting to outsmart them and nothing is for sure, whether you are a Roy or not.
“I think the central question of Succession is: can you escape family?” said Jeremy Strong in an interview with the HFPA about the premise of the HBO series. “The very first time I went to the writers’ room in London, that was on the wall on a 3-by-5 note card as the very first question and is posited as the central question…I really think we see each of these characters struggling with whether they can free themselves from this family and from the legacy that they have inherited and the way that it defines them. We all fight this battle.”
Succession was created by the English screenwriter Jesse Armstrong and also won a Golden Globe for Best Television Series – Drama in 2020. Brian Cox who plays Logan Roy, the overbearing patriarch of the family and head of the global media and entertainment conglomerate, also won the award for his performance that same year.
“A while ago now I guess I’d been thinking about these big powerful media people,” said Armstrong to the HFPA at a set visit for Succession in 2019 about the seeds of the show. “There was a story about Sumner Redstone making a joke about being asked who his successor would be, you know, a Viacom co-owner, and he said he didn’t need one because he was never going to die. I knew Rupert Murdoch had made the same joke, like exactly the same joke. And I guess it made me think about the similarities in those big powerful men. It is a subtext of the show about how it can be a bit of a search for immortality. To have power, influence, and the feeling that if your diary is full all the time that maybe you’ll never die. It’s very definitely connected those feelings of potency, importance, and life. So, I guess that was like a germ of it.”