Succession’s final season was almost split in two

Succession’s finale arrived at the perfect time. Which is to say, it happened before the show even came close to wearing out its welcome. While we mourn a show’s passing, it’s so much better to say goodbye than it is to watch a beloved show grow stale. Season four was the right time to end the show. Hindsight being 20/20, we now know this to be the case. But in 2021, Jesse Armstrong wasn’t totally sure. In the introduction to the show’s season-four scripts, published by Vulture earlier today, Armstrong recalls how he decided that four seasons was enough.

Armstrong says that after season three ended, he invited executive-producer-writers Lucy Prebble, Tony Roche, Jon Brown, and Will Tracy to his office in Brixton to “look at the alternative future-season shapes I’d written up on the walls.” Before them were two paths: A single 10-episode season or two more seasons of six or eight episodes. The latter, we assume, means it would’ve been one of those split final seasons that have become so popular in the last decade but are pretty annoying.

“My sense was that we should do one last full-fat season rather than stretch it out,” Armstrong writes. “But I was wary of saying good-bye too fast to all the relationships and opportunities, of leaving creative money on the table, regretting all the subplots that would go unwritten, the jokes left untold.”

The “little committee on whether to whack the show” took a vote. While some voted one and others voted two, Prebble delivered the deciding blow. Armstrong recalls her argument: “We could, if we wanted, keep going with a show that became increasingly rangy and fun—a climbing plant grown leggy but still throwing off beautiful blooms now and then. But the ten-episode season was the muscular way to go out.”

Armstrong says he tried to keep the “multiple future seasons” alive for a time, “almost so that the show itself didn’t know it was ending.” However, he knew four seasons was it. “I never had a serious wobble,” Armstrong writes. “No other way of going forward felt persuasive.”