It is widely accepted that Succession, HBO’s splenetic family saga, was inspired by the Murdoch dynasty. How deliciously meta, then, that the clan itself would return the favour. In 2023, Elisabeth Murdoch’s representative Mark Devereux watched Logan Roy die on screen, witnessed the chaos that followed among the fictional heirs, and panicked. The memo he wrote to prevent the family from replicating the fictional implosion caused a real one instead, leading to a court battle and a $3.3bn settlement to the siblings who missed out when Lachlan Murdoch was handed control of Fox and News Corp by his father. Jesse Armstrong, the genius behind the show, couldn’t have written it better.
Directed by the acclaimed Liz Garbus – whose credits include Harry & Meghan – Netflix’s new four-part documentary Dynasty: The Murdochs follows the story from Rupert’s earliest empire-building to that final reckoning. And as if to really ram the parallels home, tinkling through it all is Succession’s own dissonant, dizzying theme tune, with its jangling piano and stabbing strings, a persistent motif in a film that is slickly produced and gleefully told.
