Succession season 1
The first season of the American satirical comedy-drama television series Succession premiered on HBO on June 3, 2018. Series creator Jesse Armstrong serves as the showrunner for the season. The series centers on the Roy family, the owners of global media and entertainment conglomerate Waystar RoyCo, and their fight for control of the company amidst uncertainty about the health of the family's patriarch. The season features an ensemble cast of Hiam Abbass, Nicholas Braun, Brian Cox, Kieran Culkin, Peter Friedman, Natalie Gold, Matthew Macfadyen, Alan Ruck, Parker Sawyers, Sarah Snook, Jeremy Strong and Rob Yang.
In June 2016, HBO gave Succession a pilot order, to be written by Armstrong and directed by executive producer Adam McKay, and was filmed in late 2016. The series was greenlit for a season order in May 2017, which began filming in October 2017, and wrapped in early 2018. The season consists of ten episodes, and received critical acclaim. It was nominated for five Primetime Emmy Awards, and won Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series for the episode "Nobody Is Ever Missing".
Cast and characters
Main
- Hiam Abbass as Marcia Roy
- Nicholas Braun as Greg Hirsch
- Brian Cox as Logan Roy
- Kieran Culkin as Roman Roy
- Peter Friedman as Frank Vernon
- Natalie Gold as Rava Roy
- Matthew Macfadyen as Tom Wambsgans
- Alan Ruck as Connor Roy
- Parker Sawyers as Alessandro Daniels
- Sarah Snook as Siobhan "Shiv" Roy
- Jeremy Strong as Kendall Roy
- Rob Yang as Lawrence Yee
Recurring
- Dagmara Domińczyk as Karolina Novotney
- Arian Moayed as Stewy Hosseini
- J. Smith-Cameron as Gerri Kellman
- Justine Lupe as Willa Ferreyra
- David Rasche as Karl Muller
- Swayam Bhatia as Sophie Roy
- Quentin Morales as Iverson Roy
- Molly Griggs as Grace
- Mary Birdsong as Marianne Hirsch
- Judy Reyes as Eva
- Larry Pine as Sandy Furness
- Ashley Zukerman as Nate Sofrelli
- Zack Robidas as Mark Ravenhead
- James Cromwell as Ewan Roy
- Eric Bogosian as Gil Eavis
- Caitlin FitzGerald as Tabitha Hayes
- Harriet Walter as Lady Caroline Collingwood
- Scott Nicholson as Colin Stiles
- Juliana Canfield as Jess Jordan
Episodes
Production
Development
Showrunner Jesse Armstrong initially conceived the series as a feature film about the Murdoch family, but the script never went into production. Armstrong eventually expanded the scope of the story to include the larger landscape of Wall Street, which he felt better suited a television format. Armstrong wrote a new script centered on original characters loosely inspired by various powerful media families such as the Murdochs, the Redstones, the Maxwells, and the Sulzbergers. On June 6, 2016, it was announced that HBO had given the production a pilot order. The episode was written by Armstrong and directed by Adam McKay. Executive producers for the pilot include Armstrong, McKay, Will Ferrell, Frank Rich, and Kevin Messick. On May 16, 2017, it was announced that HBO had given the production a series order for a first season consisting of ten episodes. The previously announced creative team continued their involvement as the series entered into production.Casting
On October 6, 2016, it was announced that Brian Cox, Jeremy Strong, Kieran Culkin, Sarah Snook, Nicholas Braun, and Matthew Macfadyen had been cast in lead roles in the series' pilot. On November 4, 2016, it was announced that Hiam Abbass, Alan Ruck, Rob Yang, Parker Sawyers, and Peter Friedman had also joined the main cast of the pilot. Sawyers only appears in the pilot. On January 24, 2018, it was reported that Ashley Zukerman had joined the series in a recurring role.In season one, Justine Lupe was cast in a recurring guest role as Willa Ferreyra, the much younger girlfiend of Connor Roy. Lupe said that her character Willa was originally supposed to only appear in 3 episodes before she parts ways with Connor Roy in "Austerlitz". The scheduled breakup in "Austerlitz" was removed following script rewrites for the episode and the character continued to appear in subsequent episodes and seasons. Juliana Canfield originally auditioned for the role of Willa Ferreyra but the role ended up going to Lupe. A week after auditioning for Willa, Canfield was called back by casting directors to audition for a role named Jay who is a political aide to Shiv when she became involved in Democratic Party politics with Gil Eavis. The actress received a call that the role of Jay was cancelled, but she was requested to play a new character named Jess who would be the assistant to Kendall. Canfield was cast as Jess Jordan in 2017 as she was graduating from the Yale School of Drama.
Filming
The series pilot for Succession was filmed in fall 2016 with Adam McKay directing and Andrij Parekh as cinematographer. In defining the look of Succession, Parekh used Barry Ackroyd's work on McKay's The Big Short as a reference point. Succession was shot on 3-perf 35mm film using the Kodak Vision3 500T 5219 film stock which is optimized for both daylight and tungsten lighting. McKay was "adamant from the start that Succession must be shot on film and pushed that through with the producers" according to cinematographer Andrij Parekh. The reason McKay wanted to shoot on film rather than digital was to give the show a "dirter" and "more textured" look compared to the pristine images from photographing on a digital camera. Parekh used Arri's Arriflex 35BL film cameras with Angenieux 24-290mm lenses that offer up to 12x zoom using an f/2.5–T2.8 aperture and Angenieux Optimo 45-120mm lenses with an f/2.6 aperture for fast zooms. Succession was shot in a 1.43:1 aspect ratio using predominantly handheld cinematography, which was inspired by the Dogme 95 movement and intended to embody the style of mockumentaries where the camera follows the characters rather than being stationary. The observational style of characters gives the audience a fly-on-the-wall perspective. The fly-on-the-wall perspective allows the camera to react to what is happening in front of the lens. Cinematographer Patrick Capone characterized the series' camerawork as "voyeuristic" and "non-cinema", relying on natural light, close coverage and frequent zooms to evoke the feeling of "eavesdropping" upon the characters and their environments. In order to fully cover dialogue scenes, a multiple-camera setup was used.Principal photography for the rest of the first season of the series began in October 2017. The season was primarily filmed in New York City locations with additional locations in New Jersey, New Mexico and the United Kingdom. In New York City, the American Irish Historical Society on Fifth Avenue served as the location for Logan Roy's apartment. 714 Broadway was used as the location of Shiv's season 1 apartment, and the Downtown Manhattan Heliport on the East River for scenes of the Roys departing on their helicopters. For scenes depicting the interiors of the Waystar RoyCo offices, the crew used towers 4 and 7 of the World Trade Center, while 28 Liberty Street is used for exterior shots. Silvercup Studios in Queens houses many of the sets used for the series. Other filming locations for the first season included Bellevue Hospital, the Cunard Building on 25 Broadway, the East New York Freight Tunnel, and the Financial District of Lower Manhattan. From mid-to-end of January 2018, the production moved from New York to New Mexico for the episode "Austerlitz", which was primarily filmed in Santa Fe. Filming primarily took place at the 190-acre Rancho Alegre in Santa Fe. On February 22, 2018, filming took place in New Jersey, which required the closing of the Atlantic City-Brigantine tunnel.
Production on the final two episodes of season one moved to the United Kingdom. On February 25, 2018, filming for Shiv and Tom's wedding took place at Eastnor Castle in Herefordshire, England. Eastnor Castle is often used as a real-life wedding locale. The final episode's underwater lake scene following the car crash, in which Kendall escapes from the car wreckage, was filmed in a giant water tank at Pinewood Studios. Prior to filming, actor Jeremy Strong had never taken part in a significant on-screen stunt before. According to Capone, some members of the crew wanted to shoot the underwater sequences digitally with the assumption that the process would be quicker. A second camera was ready but was never used and instead the underwater sequences were entrely shot on film. Filming for the exterior shots of the lake was done at the Victoria Lake near Pinewood Studios.
Post-production
The post-production processing of the film stock for the series pilot was done by the FotoKem film laboratory in Los Angeles. By the time the full series had gone into production, film was processed and developed at the newly-launched Kodak Film Lab in New York City. Scenes shot for the final two episodes in the UK were processed at the British lab Cinelab. The captured 35mm film stock was scanned at 4K resolution for post-production editing.Music
Composition
On November 17, 2017, it was reported that Nicholas Britell would serve as the series' composer. Britell had previously collaborated with McKay on The Big Short and Vice, though Succession was the first television series that he had composed a score for. Britell visited the set where the pilot was filming in 2016. Watching the filming of a fight scene between the family patriarch Logan Roy and his son Kendall enabled Britell to experience "subconsciously kind of taking things in about the frequency of the show". McKay and Armstrong were invited to Britell's studio where they were played a chord progression that Britell said "felt very, very 1700s" and it was this chord progression that would eventually become the Succession main theme. In composing the score for the first season, Britell wanted the show's dark classical music to reflect a "mixture of absurdity and seriousness" where the show addresses the subject of increased concentrations of wealth and power among fewer people while also acknowledging the delusions of grandeur held by members of the Roy family.At the 2019 Primetime Emmy Awards, Britell won the award for Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music for his Succession main theme.