How Succession Changed the Way We Watch Prestige TV

Succession ran for four seasons on HBO from 2018 to 2023 and fundamentally altered the prestige television landscape. Jesse Armstrong's show about the Roy family's battle for control of a media empire didn't just dominate awards. It changed how audiences engage with morally bankrupt characters and Shakespearean dialogue.

The dialogue is the show's engine. Armstrong and his writing team crafted insults with the density of poetry. Characters communicate through power plays disguised as conversation, where the subtext is always more important than the text. The language infected popular culture so thoroughly that people started calling each other serious people.

The look is a deliberate choice and it is why the show feels caught rather than staged. Succession shot handheld on long lenses with two cameras running, letting operators hunt for reactions instead of hitting marks, and scenes were frequently played through in full rather than broken into coverage. Connor's Wedding, the third episode of season four, was assembled from long unbroken takes so the cast absorbed the news roughly in real time.

The ensemble acting is historically great. Jeremy Strong's Kendall Roy, a man perpetually performing competence while drowning in inadequacy, is one of television's most complex characters. Sarah Snook's Siobhan, Matthew Macfadyen's Tom, and Kieran Culkin's Roman each deliver performances that would anchor any other show.

Jesse Armstrong came out of British political comedy, writing for The Thick of It, co-writing Peep Show and co-writing In the Loop, and he ran a UK-style room where the season is broken before anything is shot. That is why the insults have Malcolm Tucker's density and why nobody gets a redemption arc. The show knew where it was going from the first table read.

Succession proved that audiences don't need likable characters. None of the Roys are good people. The show never asks you to root for anyone. Instead, it makes the family dynamics so recognizable and the writing so sharp that you watch compulsively despite finding every character morally repulsive.

The finale sparked more debate than any TV ending since The Sopranos. The show resolved its central question in a way that felt both inevitable and devastating. It chose thematic coherence over fan satisfaction, which divided viewers but elevated the show from entertainment to genuine art.

Succession's influence is already visible in the wave of wealth-focused prestige shows that followed. But none have matched its writing precision or its willingness to make every character's victory feel like a loss. It set a standard that the next generation of prestige TV will struggle to reach.

Nicholas Britell's theme does more work than most of the dialogue. It is a slightly out-of-tune piano figure over strings that keeps swelling into something grand and then collapsing back, and Britell wrote variations on it for individual characters across all four seasons. It won two Emmys, and it is the rare television theme nobody skipped.

Armstrong's follow-up tells you what he took from it. Mountainhead, which he wrote and directed for HBO in 2025, locks four tech billionaires in a house for a weekend and lets them talk: same method, different species of rich. Succession itself ran 39 episodes and won Outstanding Drama Series three times. The imitators have mostly copied the wealth rather than the structure, which is why none of them sting.

https://www.max.com/shows/succession/2a4fda77-48d8-4047-b97d-f7063e940fee