‘Succession’ production designer Stephen H. Carter reveals how they pulled off ‘America Decides’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
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When “Succession” director Andrij Parekh heard what show creator Jesse Armstrong had planned for the final season’s eighth episode, “America Decides,” he admitted to being “terrified” due to the logistics involved in creating a full-blown presidential election. For the show’s acclaimed production designer, Stephen H. Carter, the “fear was that we wouldn’t be able to pull off the scale of that in a single episode.”
Carter – a four-time Emmy nominee who was once again nominated for “Succession” this year thanks to “America Decides” – reveals to Gold Derby in an exclusive video interview that the research process that went into creating the ATN newsroom started maybe a month before the crew even had a finished script. “It was looking pretty challenging,” he says. “We pitched a control room connected to a studio set, with some hallways in between, you know, things like that. But none of them had the sort of massive magnitude of what we really wanted.”
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Carter says the team’s luck changed when the CNBC broadcast studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, became available. “We were allowed to come in and re-theme the space visually for our episode, provided we could work within the constraints of their downtime for programming,” he explains. “That meant nights and weekends and some scheduling gymnastics, but we were able to create a bit of a ballet dance in terms of our schedule and testing technology in advance to feed our content onto all their monitors, and we built some scenic pieces to help ATN it up. But yeah, that was the ultimate solution and I was really happy that it worked out as well as did.”
Carter is a three-time nominee for “Succession,” but he says his work on “America Decides” was a highlight. The episode takes place on election night as the Roy siblings all but conspire to elect a far-right candidate, Jeryd Mencken (Justin Kirk), as president because he’d allegedly help Kendall (Emmy nominee and past winner Jeremy Strong) and Roman (Emmy nominee Kieran Culkin) scuttle a deal between Waystar and tech giant Gojo. In addition to creating the ATN newsroom, where much of the episode takes place, Carter and his team had to fashion two separate political war rooms for Mencken and his opponent, the Democratic candidate Daniel Jimenez (Elliott Villar).
“The writers gave us a fair amount of backstory just to play with,” he says. “Mencken was probably out of Long Island originally. And so New York City we said would be fair game as his base. And that works well for Roman being able to sort of zip across town and pop into his war room in person. We said Jimenez would likely be somewhere in Middle America, we kind of said Denver. It was all shot in New York, but we looked for places that had sort of different styles. The Jimenez campaign certainly feels a little more down-to-earth and a little less flashy. And whereas the Menken room feels a little more like somebody who’s really going for it. And who cares about the optics of it more. Optics over policy.”
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“America Decides” features a number of standout sequences, but one moment that struck a chord with fans of the show was when Cousin Greg (Emmy nominee Nicholas Braun) inadvertently gets wasabi into the eyes of the ATN pollster Darwin Perry (guest star Adam Godley). Carter credits the show’s prop master, Monica Jacobs, for finding the right shade of wasabi.
“If I’m in there, saying the wasabi should be green or whatever, it’a too many cooks in the kitchen,” Carter says. “I just sort of stayed to the sidelines for that, but there was a conversation about the level of the sushi catering, and it really was kind of like deli takeout-level sushi, which was part of the written joke. But I think it was super well done, and just the way that you get a shot of Darwin’s finger kind of glancing off the plastic. If you go back and re-watch it, you can be like, ‘Oh, yeah, there – that’s where he must have touched the wasabi and then he’s like, kind of wiping his forehead. It’s all very plausible and feels believable, and yet at the same time, it’s classic ‘Succession’ outrageousness.”
“Succession” received 27 Emmy nominations this year, including Best Drama Series.
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