How 'Succession' is - and isn't - about Rupert Murdoch and Fox
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"Life," wrote Oscar Wilde in a famous essay in 1891, "imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life." After 37 episodes of "Succession," many of us may be forgiven for losing touch with which is which.
Take the latest episode: A knife-edge election night, almost too close to call, with suspicion of skulduggery at the ballot boxes. A leading news channel prepares to make a crucial intervention. There are back-channel conversations with the leading candidates. There's the implication that a timely endorsement could be rewarded with favors down the line.
Is that ATN - the right-leaning news network owned by Logan Roy's media conglomerate Waystar Royco in "Succession" - or Rupert Murdoch's Fox News?
HBO's dark "comedy" (if that's the right word), about an aging and ruthless media baron who loves nothing more than making or breaking political careers as his children jostle for pole position when he dies, has long been interpreted as referring to the Murdochs, although showrunner Jesse Armstrong has said that "Succession" is about "no one family."
And in fact, the show's family dynamics have always resisted the parallel - even if you'd like to think that the ruthless Roman Roy is a version of Lachlan Murdoch, who won his father's real-life succession battle, or that the conniving Shiv Roy hardly seems to have much in common with Elisabeth Murdoch, who stepped away from the Murdoch empire well before Lachlan's final ascension.
But the corporate-political side of the show has hewed closer to real life, and Sunday's episode, which played like a rewrite of 2020's presidential election eve, was the moment when the two storylines finally seemed to melt into a confusing amalgam of documentary and satirical drama.
Meanwhile, Murdoch's flagship channel just a month ago agreed - in actual real life - to a humiliating $787.5 million settlement in a lawsuit over Fox News's false claims that Donald Trump had been robbed of victory in the 2020 election through rigged voting machines.
The pretrial discovery process by the machines' manufacturer, Dominion Voting Systems, revealed an extraordinary trail of combustible internal emails and texts about the nail-biting night when Fox News's Decision Desk declared that the key state of Arizona would be won by Joe Biden.
The language in some of these communications made "Succession" look quite tame.
The post-election lines between the Trump team and the Murdoch operation sizzled with fury and betrayal. Panicked over a loss of viewers to fringier right-wing channels, Fox executives tacitly allowed some of its presenters to spout wild conspiracy theories about a stolen election while knowing them to be utter nonsense, their emails suggest. Lachlan insisted that "the narrative" around a pro-Trump rally on Nov. 14 "should be a huge celebration of the president."
That was real enough, but how could the screenwriters of "Succession," which started filming this final season in June 2022, have known? The answer is that they most likely couldn't, or at least not all of it: Their genius is to take real life and pump it up by, say, 20 percent. Only there are moments in the parallel Murdoch story that no screenwriter would dare invent or "improve."
"No brass on the battlefield" was Logan Roy's dictum before he died, supposedly discouraging family members from appearing on the newsroom floor, much less interfering with crucial editorial judgments. But by the end of "Succession's" election episode, there was a newsroom invasion of Roy children arguing furiously about whether to call it for Wisconsin and thereby "gift" the momentum, if not the election itself, to alt-right candidate Jeryd Mencken. Who has, as it happens, ingratiated himself with Roman by hinting he might find a way of halting a deal which could take Waystar Royco out of family control.
All fiction, right?
Stepping gingerly back into real life, let's remind ourselves that Rupert Murdoch once swore under oath that he had "never asked a prime minister for anything." That's what he told the Leveson Inquiry set up to inquire into British journalistic ethics in the wake of the 2011 phone-hacking scandal, which - $1 billion later - is still clogging up the English courts with settlements for victims of intrusion. (They include Prince Harry, who might yet push the case all the way to a full hearing.)
No brass on the battlefield. Except that Murdoch also once conceded that "if you want to judge my thinking, look at the Sun." And the Dominion texts also showed Rupert to be closely involved in Fox's programming decisions around the election. In other words, the top brass will, indeed, instruct at least parts of the battlefield what to think.
The Leveson Inquiry - with all its thousands of pages of testimony and witness statements - was actually a rather good resource for understanding how the real-life Murdoch interacts with editors and politicians. It would have been a rich source of material for "Succession" (according to a recent Vanity Fair profile, part of Murdoch's recent divorce settlement with Jerry Hall was the stricture that she not give story ideas to the show's writers; that alone suggests how close to the shore they sailed).
There you can read the evidence of Kelvin MacKenzie, one of Murdoch's most successful newspaper editors, of the tabloid Sun. He told the inquiry about the obeisance that prime ministers would pay to Murdoch and his U.K. chief executive, Rebekah Brooks (later to be acquitted of phone hacking charges and reinstated to run British operations): "There was never a party, a breakfast, a lunch, a cuppa or a drink that [David] Cameron & Co would not turn up to in force if the Great Man or his handmaiden Rebekah Brooks was there. There was always a queue to kiss their rings. It was gut wrenching."
Sounds like the Roy family party depicted in the episode just before this one.
Or read the words of another hugely successful former Murdoch editor, Andrew Neil, a loyal lieutenant at both the Sunday Times and Sky. He told Leveson that a Labour minister confided to him that, when it came to two major issues of public policy - Iraq and Europe - "Rupert Murdoch was the 24th member of the Blair cabinet."
Neil said that "Mr. Blair was almost certainly inclined to war anyway; but Mr. Murdoch was a powerful voice propelling him in that direction and overcoming any doubts. I understand that in the last days before the Iraq invasion began Mr. Blair spoke to Mr. Murdoch more often than he spoke to his defence or foreign secretaries."
Just like Logan Roy in his prime.
Logan, of course, is no longer with us, and whether "Succession" will choose to wrap up by appointing a new king is an open question. Back to real life where, according to a recent book by Paddy Manning, at least one Wall Street analyst believes that "it would be fair to assume Lachlan gets fired the day Rupert dies." Similarly, it's hard to imagine any of the inept Roy children reigning for long.
What is to come when the world's most powerful media tycoon finally shuffles off this mortal coil?
That's from "Hamlet," a work of fiction inspired by the medieval legend of Amleth, Prince of Denmark. Who now remembers the original prince? Is it possible that, in years to come, we will remember Logan Roy more than Rupert Murdoch? He somehow seems so much more believable.
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Alan Rusbridger is editor of Prospect magazine, and was editor in chief of the Guardian for 20 years.
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