Introduction

One Last Pitch

What happens in the room?

I’ve been asked that a lot. It’s a good question, it makes me panic: what does happen in the room? I suppose a group of writers, between eight and twelve, a mixture of Brits and Americans, comic and tragic, gather for five or six hours a day, for a few months, chat and mock and giggle, discuss lunch at length, and leave. But that can’t be it, can it? Because then, how does the show happen?

I suppose the most honest answer I can give is that ‘the room’ is the setting, the time and place, where all the possibilities of a show exist, and then gradually, carefully, sometimes surreptitiously and sometimes decisively, those possibilities are narrowed, sculpted, discarded or embraced, into the shape of a season.

Exactly how that happens depends on the personalities in the room, any process that’s been imposed, and most importantly, the showrunner, who sets the tone and the dynamic. Jesse Armstrong has always talked about running a room as being like throwing a party: that you’re responsible for the guests and the atmosphere and ensuring people want to come. He was excellent at it.

I found myself in the Succession writers’ room through a combination of personal failure and Britain’s decision to leave the EU. My career was languishing after some failed projects and a breakdown that I won’t bore you with. On the night the results of the EU referendum were announced in the summer of 2016, I was in a bar in Westminster after attending a free workshop about writing sitcoms, something I had been trying and failing to do. Jesse was there having given the session. Writers chatted, nervously, as the referendum result came in. No one expected it. I think Jesse recognised something in my politics and my sense of humour that felt familiar and could be useful. Turns out we had the same agent who recommended me for Succession anyway. But I like to think my job on the show was the only good thing to come out of Brexit.

The Succession room was always in London. Although, it’s important to say there was a writers’ room on location every day as we filmed. Jesse believes in having writers (a minimum of two, usually three, and sometimes more) present every day on set and that meant a version of ‘the room’ travelled. Sometimes it would be the kitchen of a Manhattan restaurant, sometimes the basement cinema of a millionaire’s mansion. It depended where we were shooting. But the real room, the main writers’ room – where the season was planned, storylined, designed – was always in London. Maybe that seems an odd choice for a show so decisively set in New York. But I believe something special occurred as a result of our far-away status. No writer arrived in the room feeling like an employee in immediate debt to some executive overlords waiting patiently (then impatiently) for scripts. We weren’t in intimidating environs that stressed the pressures of prestige television. Early on, we were a far-flung and not much overseen satellite office, with a sense of having been forgotten about, which provides an excellent situation for creativity to flourish.

There was the first room, soulless and anonymous, in an office block near Oxford Circus. The one with incessant drilling. Well, not incessant, occasional, which is worse. If it had been incessant, we could have addressed it, worked around it, complained about it. But it was occasional. Sometimes we’d be halfway through a day before the drilling began. And it would come in the middle of someone’s sentence and they’d drop their head into their hands as we all realised that we hadn’t even appreciated the lack of drilling and now it was too late. Now, there was drilling. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed as hard in my life as I did that first year in the office near Oxford Circus. But I can’t be sure, I couldn’t hear over the fucking drilling.

There was the second season room in Brixton, where our excellent writers’ assistant Shiv (yes, Shiv) stapled carpets to the walls to stop the cavernous echoes when we spoke, only to realize as summer struck that they made the room unbearably hot. For seasons three and four we decided to return to the safety of corporate soullessness in a shared office block in Victoria, a room with such little soundproofing that we had to come up with codenames for plot points in case the very loud businessmen next door were Succession fans with access to the internet. (A crucial event in season four became referred to as ‘Larry David’ in all conversation. ‘Is this before or after Larry David?’ we would ask.)

The room had huge white walls on which Jesse would stick swathes of blank paper, with character names as headings. He would write underneath each character any ideas from the room that stuck, from the fun, small nonsense like ‘Afraid of sharks?’ under Roman, to what turned out to be the arc of a whole season under Kendall, like ‘Beaten Dog’ (season two) or ‘Goes Beyond’ (season three). Eventually, what survived would get loaded into a massive mega-chart type thing on the largest wall, with character names horizontally across the top and episode numbers running down the left-hand side on the vertical. The basic beats of the season were plotted within.

Normally, Jesse would arrive in the room with a clear sense of the end of a season, but be open to total invention as to how we got there. For season three, he had a feeling that the siblings would band together to take on their father, and he was certain that Tom should break a trust by betraying that to Logan, but how we got there was totally up for grabs. I always loved this. The room resonated with ‘maybes’: Maybe this? Maybe that? Writers tend to be riddled with doubt. (Thank god, or we’d be directors.) A trick of writing is to stay open until you absolutely have to close down the narrative, decide for sure, just so you don’t miss that last possible moment of magic, that idea that solves everything. So you stay alive to promise till the very last minute. I remember one of the actors saying at a season one readthrough how he’d never seen scripts with so many ‘maybes’. ‘Maybe Connor does this’, ‘Maybe we see a glimpse of …’, etc. Perhaps it’s a British thing, self-effacing, embarrassed to be tyrannical, but I think it was also an overhang from the room. The occasional maybe is no bad thing. It’s not always uncertainty or lack of confidence. It’s an offer, it’s a kindness, it’s a gesture to another artist: ‘Here’s how I picture it, but how do you picture it? Do you have a better idea? There’s room. You’re involved. You’re here too.’ That’s how I felt in the room. Now I always keep the maybes in.

We had often toyed with the idea of Logan selling Waystar. It came up a lot, and in the room there were different opinions. Some thought that was antithetical to the whole show. Logan would never sell. The company was all that mattered to him. It wasn’t real. ‘But it is real!’ others would say, ‘Murdoch literally did it, it’s more real!’ An appeal to reality over the mythic was always the most powerful pitch in the room, only occasionally losing out to whatever was the most funny.

This may make the room sound competitive, but it never was. It was gentle, silly, funny, my favourite stage of making the show. It was where everything was possible. Where you could move a table of writers with a delicately told pain from your own history that would help inform a character’s past, or riff on a joke so much you might make the funniest man in the world, Tony Roche, vibrate enough with laughter he’d slowly start to cry, a gift given maybe once a season.

The necessary mode of voicing ideas is called ‘pitching’ in the room. Which is really just a wanky way of saying ‘suggesting.’ When I would pitch early on, I would always preface it by saying, ‘This is shit but –’ thus making everyone sit through a suggestion I had just told them was shit. It took me a while to realise that I was not only instructing people not to listen, but also wasting time, insisting people comfort my needy narcissism before responding to my idea. Did it really require an acknowledgment of self-loathing every time I spoke? Surely they knew I loathed myself already, I was in a writers’ room.

Pitching is a practice that bestows terrible privilege on the articulate. It relies on very quickly being able to gather people into your point of view. ‘See! It would be like this!’ The room is a particularly testing ground for writers, as an inability to verbally express what they mean might well have been the thing that led them to write in the first place. If you can directly convince someone of your point of view, why on earth would you bother to write it?

I found a particular niche for myself helping build the bones of the story, by starting from something vivid, pulpy, sometimes tragic. Instead of negating the idea before I said it, I’d contextualise it, beginning by saying, ‘This is the trashy version’ or ‘I know this is vivid, but …’ ‘Not this, but maybe – Something...