Peep Show to politics: meet TV writing powerhouse Jesse Armstrong

The man behind them all: Jesse Armstrong has penned some of dramas finest
Rex Features
Craig McLean3 August 2018

In a Manhattan boardroom, an Old Media dynastic struggle is afoot. It’s part Shakespearean, part Murdochian.

Logan Roy (played by Brian Cox) is the grouchy, thrice-married, soon-to-retire, 80-year-old boss of “the fifth-largest media conglomerate in the world”. He’s querying his son’s puckish enthusiasm for spending $1 billion “on a website”.

The formidable mogul’s heir-apparent seethes. “It’s not a f*****g website it’s a portfolio of online brands and digital video content and it’s part of an upstream investment strategy to save us,” he rattles, rattled, without pausing.

Meanwhile, tasked with delivering a report, another scion, played by Matthew Macfadyen queries his deadline: “What’s ‘the prekend?’” It’s Thursday lunchtime to Friday afternoon, and it’s the new corporate norm, stupid.

Roy family: left to right, Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Roman (Kieran Culkin), Logan (Brian Cox), Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Connor (Alan Ruck)
HBO

Soon the family will depart, at the snap of the patriarch’s fingers, in a fleet of helicopters for their country estate. The child of the housekeeper will be humiliated by another of the four Roy offspring, and a consigliere will be summarily fired. Macfadyen’s character, a clown with a whiff of sulphur, will mentally torture his sad-sack nephew, admitting — with a shark-like grin — to being “a terrible, terrible prick”.

This is Succession, HBO’s latest big-bucks, big-for-its boots — and punchily brilliant — drama. So far, so Peak TV.

But the difference here is that this glossy, 10-episode, über-American import was written by a Brixton resident, previously best known for very British comedies. And it was dreamed up in the unremarkable environs of an office for hire in central London.

“We had the writing room here, ’cause I’m based here,” explains Succession’s originator, show runner and scriptwriter Jesse Armstrong, “so we hired a Regis office off Oxford Street.”

Lead: Brian Cox as Logan Roy
HBO

Armstrong, 47, is best known as the co-creator, alongside Manchester Uni pal Sam Bain, of Peep Show and Fresh Meat. From top to bottom, from budget to ambition, Succession is a very different beast from those cult sitcoms. In US TV writing-room style, Armstrong headed a team of seven American writers, working 10am to 6pm over six months last year.

“You know, they got used to the continual sound of drilling, no air-con, warm Coke…” smiles the cheerful father-of-two as we talk in another grim room, a windowless cell in Succession’s publicist’s Holborn offices.

Lack of indulgence certainly produced lean, taut scripts that bristle with bitter family strife, incisive commentary on the current global media-political complex and hard-edged humour. Still, Armstrong is uncomfortable with the unwieldy term “dramedy”, simply stating “that’s how I write. It is a drama, but it does have some jokes in it”.

To his mind, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and Breaking Bad all fit that model. “I wouldn’t argue my head off with anyone who called those comedies. Sure, blacker than black, and not always comedic, and they also do all sorts of things. But that’s what I would aspire to: to have that freedom of [creative] movement. If you exclude comic tone you end up taking some of these powerful characters at their own estimation, as if they never make a mistake.”

End of an era: Mark throws a party for Jez's 40th birthday in the last episode of Peep Show
Channel 4

After a career largely spent working with Channel 4 and the BBC (he was also a writer on The Thick of It), Armstrong was seduced by the budgets yet undaunted by the rigours of US television production. He insists that he and his team weren’t regularly buzzed by swarms of incoming HBO execs. “They came over once to make sure we weren’t just getting high off Oxford Street. They’re the opposite of meddlers.”

Entertaining on multiple levels, Succession plots a sure footing through the shifting tectonic plates of modern media ownership and tech innovation, and “a very vicious political climate”. They’re worlds in which Armstrong has long been interested.

In his early 20s he was a “really crap” researcher for the Labour Party, leaving when Tony Blair swept to power in 1997. Ten years ago he wrote an as yet unfilmed script about the Murdoch clan. “Succession isn’t looking at daily party politics, although it is trying to engage with why politics is the way it is now. But I wouldn’t be crazy about trying to write Brexit: The Sitcom.”

Succession: The HBO drama is on Sky Atlantic
HBO

I tell him that Benedict Cumberbatch is currently filming his Channel 4 Brexit drama in London. “Is he? Well, good luck to him! I remember talking to someone who wanted to do a Jeremy Corbyn drama, about what a disaster he was — then the election last year comes along and maybe that story isn’t going to be what you thought it was…”

Succession has been commissioned for a second series, and writing is already under way. Are they being indulged with a bigger Regis space?

“No, we’ve got a nice office this time,” grins Armstrong, “nearer me in south London. I hope the writers like their new environs — but it’s not Santa Monica!”

Succession is on Sky Atlantic and NOW TV

Jesse Armstrong Hit Box Sets

Fresh Meat- Netflix

Put six very different young students in a house-share together and the results are at once hilarious and poignant. Starring Jack Whitehall and Zawe Ashton.

Peep Show Season 9- Netflix

The latest series sees the return of hapless college chums Mark and Jeremy living together in a flat in Croydon.

The Thick of It- Netflix

Award-winning comedy about the inner workings of British government with a focus on the fictitious Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship.

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