When the TV series Succession comes to an end on Sunday in the US – and on Monday in the UK – viewers will finally discover which, if any, of the squabbling Roy siblings will come out on top. But there is already one undisputed winner: the show’s composer, Nicholas Britell, whose score has been described as “the definitive TV theme of the 21st century”, changing the way TV productions use music to enhance or mirror plots.
In a series of interviews last week, Britell, 42, lifted the lid on the show’s Emmy-winning score, telling New York public radio that it had succeeded “beyond my, any of our wildest dreams … it has been very special that the music has resonated the way it has”.
In an interview on the Roger Ebert website, Britell, a Manhattan-based composer whose previous scores were for film, acknowledged that the music over the opening credits succeeded in getting viewers into “Succession mode”.
“I’ve loved theme songs since I was very, very young,” Britell said. “There’s something about TV theme songs but also opening credit sequences – and I think about that in movies as well. I’m a big fan of formal cinematic structures.
“Especially with something like Succession, there’s almost this idea of an overture to an opera, let’s say, or a musical, where the music is going to bring you into this world and set the stage, no pun intended. It’s sort of saying “here we go”.
The end sequence music was, Britell said, “there to sort of allow you a moment of contemplation, to ponder what you have just felt”.
Britell said he was inspired to mix late-17th-century music style with hip-hop for the show’s theme after seeing Jeremy Strong (Kendall Roy) rapping to the Beastie Boys’ An Open Letter to NYC.
A lengthy analysis in the New York Times detailed how Britell had written something unusual in television, turning a classic theme-and-variations work into a piece fit for a concert hall. The underlying eight-chord motif resurfaced in classical and baroque forms, with some that would blend in with chamber music.
“My sort-of thesis there was that I would be very serious with the music, and inhabit this mixture of oversized beats and very late-18th-century classical music harmonies – everything would be a little too big for itself, a little out of proportion – the way the Roy family sees themselves,” he told Billboard after the second season.
Britell had worked on Wall Street after graduating from Juilliard and Harvard where he’d had a hip-hop band and written music for his friend’s films. But the band broke up and the movie didn’t come out. Meanwhile, his experiences of working as a currency trader at Bear Stearns in 2008 as the bank failed “were really very unhappy”, he said.
Each season of Succession required five to 10 new musical themes, in addition to variations on the main theme, and each required a different tempo – an allegro in season one, an adagio in two, season three was a lighter scherzo, and four “a sound where it could allow for the possibility of a future of some sort, while also staying true to, to me, that strange mixture of absurdity and gravitas that is the essence of the show”.
Susan Jacobs, a New York music supervisor who places music in TV and film, said: “He came up with an operatic suite that you could almost see as an aria with these amazing complexities – something that could be very beautiful, sinister and driving at the same time.
“It’s like a beautiful tapestry that you can keep pulling at the threads of. It does everything it needs to do, a piece that he could carry forward through the entire show.”
There’s very little about Succession that hasn’t been scrutinised in the lead up to the finale, whether that’s the fashion, “a four-season-long symphony of neutrals and fine materials”, according to Vanity Fair, or the use of language in the series, particularly insults. Long after Succession ends, it “will live on in our infinite brain boxes”, said the Wall Street Journal.
But it may be the music that lives on longest. Succession executive producer Adam McKay and writer Jesse Armstrong invited Britell to watch the filming of the pilot, and that helped him to “subconsciously kind of take things in about the frequency of the show”. What he came up with, he told PBS, was a mix of “dark, courtly classical sound” and “oversize hip-hop beats and 808s”, referring to the 1980s Roland TR-808 drum machine.
The sound was designed to be imperfect and slightly off-key because “when things sound ‘right’ for the Roy family, it’s wrong … the family is so dysfunctional that the music has to have this kind of brokenness to it somehow.”
That brokenness, however it is resolved or unresolved in the finale, will trail out with Britell’s score.
