Created by Vince Gilligan as a spin-off from his hit TV series Breaking Bad (see below), Better Call Saul has received similar levels of critical acclaim for its writing. In fact, when the pilot aired in 2015, it became the highest-rated premiere in cable history. This is one of the best TV scripts in recent years. An ancillary benefit of keeping yourself out of the show is that what you thought you were transmitting is not necessarily what people will receive. And that’s a good thing. People are hungry, especially right now perhaps, for things that are other than what they seem — characters and situations that are allowed to be multiple. We all have an impulse to want to pull the mask off the baddie and have something simple revealed — base truths and clear explanations. But that first reducing, simplifying impulse will likely never wholly satisfy because it offends our deep sense of what the world is really like. Here’s a script from a show that famously doesn’t rely on scripts. Instead, writer Larry David produces an outline himself, and the dialogue is largely improvised by the actors on set. Nevertheless, this is essential reading for all comedy TV writers looking to find humor in the minutiae of daily life. Armstrong with Brian Cox during the filming of season two of Succession. Photograph: Zach Dilgard, HBO Collected here for the first time, the complete scripts of Succession: Season One feature unseen extra material, including deleted scenes, alternative dialogue and character directions. They reveal a unique insight into the writing, creation and development of a TV sensation and a screen-writing masterpiece.

Shonda Rhimes’ Scandal lasted for seven seasons from 2012 to 2018 and is another great example of a TV script based around the machinations of Washington. The lead protagonist was based on a former White House press aide Judy Smith, who was a co-executive producer on the show. Prebble, a writer celebrated for her hit play Enron, had hopes of running her own show and initially she wasn’t overjoyed by the prospect of working under someone else. “I gloomily decided this was the beginning of the slippery slope down into being ‘meat in the room’,” Prebble says. “As you can see, I was an idiot. Once I read the pilot, I was bound to the show. I recognised the toxic family so completely and also knew a bit of the corporate American world it was exploring.”I think a lot of the better films and TV shows I’ve been involved with have at their heart a quite simple impulse around which the more subtle layers are spun. In the Loop’s spark was anger at the Iraq war. Chris Morris’s Four Lions I think was driven by his gut feeling that something was very wrong with the way we understood jihadi terrorism in the UK. Peep Show was about oddball male friendship, perhaps even “masculinity”. Show Leave a Comment ‘This Was Simply How This Story Had to Go’ https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/7a0/d93/5dc470c7b5066dfe4cac098d1384f7b5af-succession-script.jpg Read this script not only for inspiration on how to create a dystopian future world but also how to adapt a novel into a TV series. This show does a great job recreating Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel of the same name and the author also served as a consulting producer. Faber Members have access to live and online events, special editions and book promotions, and articles and quizzes through our weekly e-newsletter. He outlines his case in which he accepts that the streaming companies have taken a hit recently, but he maintains they are still highly profitable and those profits should be more favourably shared with the people who create their content and that writers should be protected from the threat of AI.

Note this TV pilot’s use of handheld cameras, voiceover and occasional use of historical photos and movie footage to set it apart from the norm. In the brief respite since the fourth and final season of Succession reached its conclusion, the drama’s creator, Jesse Armstrong, has got used to fielding a banal question: what is he going to do next? Although he devoted seven years of his life to making one of the most critically acclaimed TV shows of the past decade, there is nonetheless an unthinking expectation that he should have another brilliant project up his sleeve, all ready to go. Matsson's vision for the business leads Shiv and Roman to manage the fallout, while Logan weighs his options.In the meantime, he says he’s happy reading, playing sport (five-a-side and tennis) and taking time to think. He’s earned the break. Whatever comes next, he’s already staked a claim to being the finest comic tragedian of our times. Succession: Season One will include an exclusive introduction from creator and showrunner Jesse Armstrong. Season Two, Season Three and Season Four will also include exclusive introductions by other screenwriters on the show including executive producer Frank Rich and executive producer and writer Lucy Prebble. Seasons One, Two and Three will be published on 18th May, with Succession: Season Four shortly following the end of that series.

My US agent was the first person I recall suggesting a totally different approach. A fictional family, a multi-series US show. For five years or so, I dismissed the idea, certain that a portrayal of a fictional family would never have the power of a real one. Four works changed my mind: HBO’s excellent Robert Durst documentary, The Jinx; Sumner Redstone’s grimly business-focused autobiography, A Passion to Win; James B Stewart’s propulsive DisneyWar; and Tom Bower’s fascinating Robert Maxwell biography Maxwell: The Final Verdict. These turned the idea of doing a media-family drama without a singular real-life model from a terrible betrayal of reality into a tantalising chance to harvest all the best stories. Here was an opportunity to explore all the most fascinating family dynamics within a propitiously balanced fictional hybrid media conglomerate. I took a long, deep dive into rich-family and media-business research. I talked about this, as-yet-unwritten, idea in half-ironised terms as ‘Festen-meets-Dallas’ Loosely based on the Murdoch family, Jesse Armstrong‘s Succession tells a story of the power struggle within a wealthy, media-company-owning family. The HBO series has won nine Emmys including two wins for Armstrong in the Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series category. After missing a year due to the Covid pandemic, Succession returned with its most critically acclaimed season to date. Of course, knowing that the arc of the season is essentially right doesn’t mean that the writing goes easily. No, there are still many days when you stare at the index cards which were supposed to spell out the spine of the episode and they no longer connect. You start to feel you can’t really remember what a story is. What is it even that people like about a TV show? About anything? What is true? And you can find yourself Googling, “What is a story?” “What things do people do?” “What is interesting?” Reuniting the executive producers of 24, Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa, this show was based on the Israeli TV series, Hatufim. The pair developed the idea in early 2010 and Showtime green-lit it in 2011. While its later seasons came in for a fair amount of criticism, these early TV scripts are well worth studying.Faber has scooped the complete, authorised scripts to all four seasons of the Emmy-winning HBO Original drama series "Succession", complete with introductions from the writers. Producer Veena Sud describes this excellent remake of the Danish original as “slow-burn storytelling in a sense that every moment that we don’t have to prettify or gloss over or make something necessarily easy to digest, that we’re able to go to all sorts of places that are honest, and dark, and beautiful and tragic, in a way that is how a story should be told.”