SUCCESSION vs ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT: The Series Engine

This week we’re going to be talking about Succession. If you haven’t already seen the whole season, don’t worry. We aren’t going to give away any major spoilers.
What we’re going to be looking at this week is the structure of Succession: the way that this piece is actually put together and the way the season is created so that every single episode can feel completely different but also deliver the same emotional experience to its audience.

If you haven’t seen Succession, basically here’s the premise: What if Rupert Murdoch were King Lear?
 
That’s the structure of the piece. It’s looking at a modern day tycoon, a modern day king (in fact his last name is Roy, which means king). And this patriarch, Logan Roy, is sick and needs someone to take over the “throne”—to take over control of his company.
Like King Lear, he has some children.
Lear has three daughters; Logan Roy has four children. And he needs one of these children, or all of these children, to step up and take over the kingdom of his giant media empire.
And of course, the problem is that all of his children are spoiled and also hurt and broken. There’s nobody who’s actually ready to succeed him.
In many ways Succession is really a show about trust.
It’s a show about what happens when trust—between father and son, father and daughter, husband and wife—gets violated.
It’s about the kinds of choices people make in a world where they can’t trust each other—when the trust between corporations and people, between rich and poor, breaks down. It’s about what happens to our families, and what happens to our society.
And the painful thing about watching Succession is that, because nobody trusts anybody, no one can feel the love that actually exists.
All of these people are the product of a deeply dysfunctional family, run by a deeply dysfunctional patriarch, who of course has demons of his own and his own past that he’s wrestling with.
And what they do so beautifully in Succession is to fully dramatize these characters. Everybody in the show is awful. Everybody in this show is selfish, greedy. They’re the awful, entitled 1%—the worst possible version of those people. Everybody has some inner awfulness that they wreak upon the people around them.
And at the same time, every single character in Succession is totally human.
Every time you think that you’re going to finally write somebody off, the show exposes some humanness in them, some little bit of love, some little flicker of what they could have been, some attempt to do the right thing… and suddenly your heart breaks for them again.
Sure it’s loosely inspired by Lear and loosely inspired by Rupert Murdoch, and as the show creator Jesse Armstrong has noted, loosely inspired by every succession story through the ages from Shakespeare all the way to the royal succession in England.
Even though it’s inspired by all these very serious stories, as a series, the engine of Succession is actually nearly the same as a series that you probably would never equate with it.

In fact, Succession, the series, actually has the same basic structure and the same basic engine as Arrested Development!
You could even pitch Succession as the black-comic-real-world version of Arrested Development.
Like Arrested Development, the engine of Succession is a bunch of maladjusted 1% kids, who are victims of their totally narcissistic father and mother, who are struggling to do their best but don’t have the emotional means to do so even though they have all the money in the world.
The main “kid” in Arrested Development is Michael Bluth, and in Succession it’s Kendall Roy. He’s the one kid who, in each episode, is trying his best to save the family business now that the “king” (that is, the dad) is deposed.
In Succession, Logan Roy is deposed in episode 1 by a stroke....