It was a term of Jerry Hall’s divorce settlement from Rupert Murdoch, according to Vanity Fair, that she couldn’t “give story ideas” to the writers of Succession. Thankfully, as its sublime finale showed last week, they continued to manage without her contributions.
Whatever was behind Murdoch’s Succession anxiety, it confirmed what was widely assumed: that a drama in which an elderly tyrant’s adult children compete to inherit a media empire (built on the subjugation of political leaders) held up a mirror to his own dynasty, even if, as its creator would regularly insist, it wasn’t based on them. “It’s not bullshit to say it really isn’t the Murdochs,” Jesse Armstrong told the Guardian in 2018, when Succession launched. That was four years before Hall was let go, in terms that only emphasised the gulf between Murdochian reality and a Succession script. “Jerry, sadly I’ve decided to call an end to our marriage,” went her husband’s unexpected email, according to Vanity Fair. “We have certainly had some good times, but I have much to do.” You wondered if an earlier wife, Wendy Deng, mocked for her musings on Tony Blair (“He has such good body and he has really really good legs Butt …”) wasn’t actually more fluent than her ex.
Maybe lots of media patriarchs have an oldest child they sometimes forget about, or a news channel that doubles as a platform for demagogues. Only one, however, would appear to have foreshadowed Succession’s Logan Roy the way Murdoch did when, sitting beside his son James at a 2011 hearing about phone hacking, he told the parliamentary committee: “This is the most humble day of my life.” In Succession, Roy, accompanied by his son Kendall, tells Congress: “When I read of the abuses of power alleged in my cruise division, well, that was the worst day of my life.”
It should be stressed that only Murdoch had to live with the finding that he was “not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company”.
That inspiration came from a variety of dynasties and proprietors has not stopped viewers merging Roys and Murdochs to a point that the real family, bathed in Succession’s lustre, could suffer more than anyone from its conclusion. Since, as with virtually every recent, gorgeously produced satire about the insanely rich and disagreeable, Succession’s savagery is fully compatible with wealth tourism. No matter how dire the plutocratic conduct, it’s disarming to watch it unfold in penthouses, mansions, ranches, on private beaches, in jets, spas, castles, restaurants (“those cod cheeks were a worthy opponent”) or aboard yachts where no one looks like Philip Green. Thus elevated from the grimier aspects of rich-list domination that Succession, being entertainment, necessarily omits, the Murdochs have appeared cool – probably for the first and last time.
Like other muses, they may not even object to people widely associated with themselves being portrayed as more attractive and, unless the plot demands otherwise, better dressed. Courtesy of the most generous casting since Benedict Cumberbatch played Dominic Cummings, we find the 92-year-old Murdoch adorably reimagined (if only in the minds of his divorce lawyers) as an actor whose cragginess, in the shape of Brian Cox, is decades from being, when pictured in a romantic context, emetic. And whose clothes are – as Murdoch’s have not yet been – the object of reverent analysis at GQ. Instead of “the standard issue of white masculine supremacy”, it noted of one outfit, “Roy has opted instead for a look defined by an expensive softness”.
Even if – as would help explain their popularity with everyone from David Cameron to, for a while, Gordon Brown – the Murdochs are privately amusing, there are also worse fates, given the public rarely sees the dynasty at its wittiest, than being lent the combined brilliance of the Succession writers’ room. True, at the Leveson inquiry, Murdoch was discovered to have said an amusing thing at the 1987 election (“That’s me!”, after Ken Livingstone complained about “the dreadful lies and smears of the media”), but he attributed it to alcohol. A recent and much appreciated episode featuring Murdoch’s two-week engagement to a devout former dental hygienist also appears to have been, though it was never explained, only inadvertently hilarious.
That Succession has supplied its ghastliest family members – except Greg – with some extenuation, is perhaps its greatest gift to anyone mistaken for them. Logan Roy’s treatment of his children, who duly developed legacy character flaws, is ultimately traced back to his being a mistreated and traumatised child, making later triumphs a kind of majestic victory over deprivation. A final glimpse of him singing sentimentally with friends further reminds everyone that the monster had a sweeter side. Maybe Murdoch senior also had a miserable, scarring upbringing that helps explain why – given the hurt child within – he feels driven, among other things, to influence elections, control leaders and allow his television stations to disseminate the transparently false?
But any similarity with Rupert Murdoch is, as Armstrong has said, bullshit. The living magnate is the Oxford-educated son of a prosperous newspaper proprietor, Sir Keith, whose upbringing, the New York Times commented – in an investigation that naturally created less of a stir than the exit of Logan Roy – was “an extended tutorial in how to use media holdings to extract favors from politicians”.
It could still be among Jesse Armstrong’s considerable achievements that, after despatching his invented dynasty, he ends by sending bereft viewers on a search for stories about real-life Murdochs. A recent highlight in their seven-decade series being Fox v Dominion, in which Mr Murdoch spends $787.5m (£633m) to avoid answering questions about false claims made on his TV channel about the “stolen” 2020 election. For which one source turned out to be a self-styled time traveller who stated: “The Wind tells me I’m a ghost.”
So God knows what Jerry Hall could have given the writers.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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