by Tom George Hammond

“Dallas meets Festen” was Jesse Armstrong’s pitch for Succession, a remarkable proposal as Festen functions as a sort of anti-Dallas.  Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 film was the first to correspond to the rules of Dogme 95, a treaty drawn up by Vinterberg and Lars Von Trier which defined the terms for a revolution in low-budget filmmaking.  This new wave embraced shooting digitally, and barred use of sets, props, rigged cameras, or incidental music.  It also secluded genre filmmaking, and any plotting that involved the appearance of a firearm.  These rules are set in stone on a new wave Magna Carta called “The Vows of Chastity”.  The ultimate emphasis is on truth over spectacle.  So if a brazen sort were to strip Dallas of all its pomp and soapy élan, they might arrive at Festen.  

Shot – as per the rules – almost entirely on location at the gorgeous Skjoldenæsholm, Vinterberg’s cinema vérité lens watches a wealthy family implode with a certain acerbic ambivalence.  There is a clear cut villain to the piece, in the form of abusive patriarch Helge, but his children are drunken, boorish, racist, and possibly even incestuous.  In other words, it’s a film in which a lot of rich, broken people hurt each other, but still arrive at breakfast the next morning.  Succession is so indebted to Festen, Armstrong used the English translated title “Celebration” for his pilot script.  The spine of that episode, in which a family birthday is wrecked by a terrible confrontation between father and son, plays as a respectful homage to Vinterberg’s film.

But there is something in Festen’s low-budget DNA that can be traced through nearly all of Armstrong’s television work.  Peep Show, co-written and created with Sam Bain, arrived as part of the boom of gritty, low-cost sitcoms in the early 2000s.  Similar shows like Marion and Geoff, Human Remains, and The Office all play like byproducts of the Dogme 95 manifesto; they are “pure” sitcoms with no reliance on music or laughter tracks.  The camera is cast as a character, one who literally cannot be everywhere at once, and may either miss important exchanges or only see certain scenes from certain angles.  Shooting on video may produce starker – and, frankly, uglier – footage, but it also allowed a set of largely unknown creatives to forge innovative work on the cheap.  Marion and Geoff began as a self-funded tape Rob Brydon made with his own camera, while Peep Show was a DIY pilot that the team had to shoot in two-halves before sending to Channel 4.

Peep Show, with its indispensable feature of Mark and Jez’s interior monologues, broke one cardinal rule of Dogme 95; “the sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa”.  Aside from that, it was – at first, at least – shot on location in Croydon in a hired flat, and filmed in a remarkably complex style to achieve it’s POV aesthetic; either captured handheld, with a cast member rigidly following and acting around the operator, or with the principal actors wearing appointed headcams.  There is a quality to the writing, in the way that it continues to go there, finding further cliffs for the characters to fall from, that recalls Vinterberg’s film.  One of Festen’s tricks is that its shooting style literally cannot flatter its actors; Vinterberg cast character actors and captured them on video using natural light without application of any filters.  The camera will only find the ensemble exactly as they are.  There cannot be another sitcom that films its protagonists as unflatteringly as they do on Peep Show.  We get so close to Mark and Jez’s faces, as they slobber into a drunken kiss, or screw up every feature in a moment of rage, or cackle at the hatching of a new, awful scheme; sometimes we peer at them from below, catching them at the exact angle where everyone looks either like a disgraced Royal or a boiled egg.

A lot is made of Succession’s limited audience – or, at least, how it compared with shows like The Good Doctor, or Blue Bloods, or Fire Country, all of which achieved a larger ratings share without ever enjoying the former’s cultural caché.  Despite this, Succession was never under threat of cancellation, having the complete support of its broadcaster from start to finish, including a seemingly limitless budget.  The same cannot be said of Peep Show, which initially struggled to get re-commissioned.  In fact it was almost canceled after its third outing, but Channel 4 revised their decision, in part to keep the lead actors within the network’s talent pool.  Perhaps it is inherently a cult item; British comedy is littered with sad-sacks and misanthropes, but few programmes would reach the depths of a lead character killing and burning a dog, before briefly attempting to eat the carcass.  There is a mercy offered by other sitcoms, from Fawlty Towers to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, where the arrogance or stupidity of the protagonists meets the friction of everyday politeness.  In Peep Show there is no such mercy; Mark and Jez are rotten, and so are their friends, their colleagues, their bosses, and their family.  There are romance plots that are hilariously devoid of any usual catharsis (Mark and Jez are usually happy until they realize who they’ve fallen in love with), and the grand arc of the series is the two protagonists slowly whittling down their expectations for their remaining years.  

Such bleakness speaks to the vérité form.  The essential message behind Dogme 95’s “Vows of Chastity” is: do not make a low budget a hindrance, instead make it the point.  Good things cannot really happen to Mark and Jez because the budget dictates it; they are trapped in a grey world of half-empty pubs, low-priced chain restaurants and travel hotels.  Jez anticipates a dramatic escape into fame and fortune, while Mark seeks the respectable image of a family man with a firm footing on the property ladder.  If they do not alienate themselves from a hopeful opportunity, life will snap it away from them regardless.  Jez meets a half-famous musician, then he gets groomed into sex work.  Mark starts researching the biography of a Faulkands veteran, before a soldier rapes him.  These kinds of extreme plot points might sink another show, but Bain and Armstrong are incredibly proficient at disguising the narrative engine.  Each episode is a tightly-structured farce that plays out as if anything could happen, and each series has carefully planted threads which somehow feel like accidents.  This was also true of Succession; every time the credits rolled, there was always a little pleasure to be taken in having no idea where the series was going, and with it the trust that comes in journeying with a great writer.

The “purest” – for lack of a better word – sitcom of that era is arguably The Thick of It, which Armstrong wrote on for the first three series.  There’s no narration, no music plays over the credits, and the handheld camera work is deliberately messy, as if the crew are having to chase the actors to get the necessary footage.  This all came from Festen, which creator Armando Iannuci and DOP Jamie Carney used as a blueprint when they embarked on the pilot.  Another major inspiration was The Larry Sanders Show, one of the first major hits for the then nascent HBO.  Larry Sanders was endearingly low-budget throughout it’s six year run; the director Todd Holland would dress the set with borrowed furniture from his own home, the principal camera operator would track the cast on roller-blades, and creator/star Gary Shandling offered his patio as an amorphous set for cafés or restaurants.  Iannucci and co. doubled down on these thrifty sensibilities, and somehow took a miniscule £100,000 budget for a pilot and produced three complete half-hour episodes as a proof of concept.  The first series was filmed almost in its entirety at the Guinness brewery in Park Royal, West London, right up until the building was demolished.  That location perfectly matched the tone of the show; the wallpaper is peeling, the carpets are frayed, with rare glimmers of sunlight peeking through tattered blinds.  It is the anti-West Wing, about people who want more power than they have, holed up in a drab place where ambition goes to die.  

A particular visual language was created through The Thick of It, which highlighted its routes in improvisation; the camera often seems unsure of whether a conversation has ended, and is as surprised at any outbursts or interruptions as the other characters.  It is always about catching details instead of magnifying them.  Part of this language is pure Larry Sanders, specifically the use of quick cuts as gags, often jumping from a character making a firm decision to them doing the exact opposite in the next scene.  Another contributing factor was the arrival of video editing, which eliminated the need for precise blocking, or “hitting the mark”.  Actors no longer needed to worry about coverage, which in turn meant that a dozen different gags could be occurring on screen all at once.  This, like Arrested Development, makes The Thick of It endlessly rewarding to re-watch, for all of the discrete gestures, eyebrow raises and one-liners jammed around the edges of every scene.  There are pockets of character detail too, such as Nicola Murray’s failing marriage, or Olly Reeder being continually charged with stealing policy ideas, which are sprinkled in without ever stealing focus.  These small features invite the audience to craft a broader world beyond the show; it’s as if there are a dozen doors left ajar, and we’re only getting a glimpse of the whole picture.  

The plotting is intricate but somehow kept at a remove.  There are markers in place to stir the scenes, often involving an inquiry or a new rival to Malcolm Tucker’s throne, but the edits naturally favoured funny lines over exposition, in fact any exposition was usually packed into a few quick exchanges at the start of each episode, putting up the masting as swiftly as possible for the chaos to then resume.  Half-hour episodes would be chiseled down from hours of material, a little like a panel show, where the least important thing is the game being played.  TV writers are plied with the idea of structure as the most vital discipline, but mediocre shows often play with all that scaffolding still visibly in place.  Characters move with the sense that they are in a story, and that another scene is calling them but cannot start until all their motivations are in check.  A cut exists of the pilot episode of Succession where it hit its narrative beats more clearly, but this meant excising some great character moments in the process; ultimately, this more ‘disciplined’ version was scrapped.  People did not watch Succession for its board seat disputes or its shareholder meetings, just as people did not watch The Thick of It to see if Nicola Murray could launch her fourth sector initiatives.  The plot is a great tapestry, and the show is super focused on the finest bits of stitching.  

In the Loop, a semi-adaptation of The Thick of It for the big screen (which Iannuci directed and wrote, alongside Armstrong, Simon Blackwell and Tony Roche), made another breach from the Dogme 95 directives; it brought music to the world Malcolm Tucker.  This was the price of jumping mediums, or perhaps – given the jet-setting, trans-Atlantic narrative – just a necessity to cover an increase in second unit footage.  Accompanying Tucker and Tom Hollander’s hapless Minister, Simon Forster, is a tinkling classical music score, comprised of Bach, Debussy and Corelli.  The writing, however, is business as usual.  If a character wins one argument, they will likely be humiliated in the next.  Everyone is venal, smug and rather pathetic.  In any moment where you begin to sympathize with someone, they will then immediately do something awful.  Chris Morris called Jeremy Armstrong the “perfect sadist” because of this writing pattern; you forget who you want to win, or even what winning looks like.  In the end, Malcolm Tucker snags a victory, saving face in front of his American counterparts and, in the process, launches war in the Middle-East.  Of course the awarding of sympathy is not the point; it’s a film about things as they are, not how one would wish them to be.  There’s a fun cameo from James Gandolfini as an out-of-action Pentagon stiff, but the show is near-stolen by David Rasche’s foreign policy hawk, Clinton Barwick.  Rasche fitted effortlessly into the ensemble, bringing the same rugged, Waspish reserve he would later serve up as Karl in Succession.  

At the time of In the Loop’s release, another TV revolution was in motion.  The success of the Swedish serial Wallander on BBC Four – where The Thick of It was initially screened – led the BBC to buy the rights to Forbrydelsen (The Killing), Broen (The Bridge), and Borgen.  All three shows were produced by DR (Danish Broadcasting Company), which became the flagship network in the subsequent gold rush for high-brow, imported European drama.  The best of these was Arvingerne (The Legacy – although the word literally translates as The Heirs), which first aired on DR1 in 2014.  Set on Funen, an island in Southern Denmark, the series was described by The Guardian as “not a whodunit, but a whogetsit”; the death of an artist triggers a battle over her estate amongst her four children, one of whom was a child given up for adoption.  The estate in question is a stunning manor house called Grønnegaard, which bears an uncanny semblance to the castle setting of Festen.  Trine Dyrholm, who played a maid in Vinterberg’s film, returns as the eldest daughter, Gro, who gets caught in the tailwind of a family conflict that slowly escalates until a moment of genuinely shocking violence.  Similarities to Festen were noted in print at the time, but the comparison came with a sense of pride.  The Dogme 95 set were imbued with an enfant terrible sensibility that comes with operating at the fringes, with miniscule budgets.  Arvingerne carried value – this was a consciously prestige drama that took time to breathe in its handsome cinematography – but with it, a notion that the pirates had claimed the fort.  Dogme 95 was like a grab for quality, a wild run for greatness that refused to be hampered by any economic considerations.  With Arvingerne, that greatness sits, fully realised, twinkling in the brisk Scandinavian sun.  

Legacy became the watchword in the later series of The Thick of It.  It began as a riff on Blair’s resignation, but lingered into the fourth and final outing, where Labour was sent shivering back into opposition.  Malcolm Tucker was particularly obsessed; career-wise, he was on borrowed time, yet he insisted on sticking around for one last coup.  By the series finale, he faced imminent arrest, and strived to create a noble exit.  He failed, and his last words were; “it doesn’t matter”.  There’s a nice symmetry too, in the Conservatives ousting their Malcolm equivalent – jargon-spouting Stewart Pearson – in an equally brutal fashion.  The terms of the show dictate that there is always another crisis; as Malcolm and Stewart are sent packing, another problem hits and everyone is once more off scurrying to fix it.  It’s a cutthroat ending, because it isn’t really an ending.  The world is carrying on, the audience – via Malcolm – has just lost its access to it.  No character is bigger than the world they occupy.  Peep Show concluded with a customary bleakness, with Mark and Jez sat alone, having blown another round of relationships, still confined to their medium-sized Croydon flat.  Jez is still unemployed, and Mark still wants to be rid of his slacker friend.  As Jez puts in his birthday speech; “At the end of the day, we’ve lived together for shit-long, and it’s been alright”.  So we leave them in this purgatory, almost exactly as we found them: wrestling with the predicament of life while splayed out in front of the television.  

The leap from Peep Show to Succession may seem implausible, but what made the latter so winning was the outsider nature of the creative team.  There’s a reason most Hollywood satires are interminable; too much proximity to the source leads one to winkingly parody instead of eviscerate.  It’s fitting, then, that one of the great modern satires on the American aristocracy was first created in a rented office in South London.  The form of Festen embodies this kind of distance; we, the audience, have snuck in behind the veil; this is firmly not a case of the bourgeois providing a light revue of their own turmoil.  Succession operated with a blank check, demonstrating a limitless conveyor-belt of airplanes, helicopters and fine tailoring.  These details were reported by experts and spies from the inside to the writer’s room, who then passed them on to the viewers at home.  

Director Mark Mylod is credited for a certain innovation in Succession’s style.  Each episode is a collage of small observations, shot in the dizzying way of The Thick of It, as if the camera operator cannot believe the access they are being given, and is rushing to get as much footage as possible before the shutters permanently come down.  Mylod’s specialty became whip pans to the “other” in the Succession world; the unseen footprint of service people, and the great mass of waste our protagonists leave behind.  In Season 2’s “Tern Haven” – where the Roy family meet their liberal counterparts in the form of the Pierces, who are somehow equally as hideous, albeit an entirely different way – there is a superb sequence where we watch a housekeeper slave over a dish of lamb, before her employer swoops in and takes the meal through to the dining table, earning rapturous applause from her guests.  The housekeeper is seen, stood soberly, almost a blur at the side of the frame.  Mylod’s camera blinks at her, briefly sympathetic, before plowing on with the other guests.

Later at that same dinner comes another break in the form, when middle sister Shiv Roy announces herself as the heir to the company, an impulsive action which bulldozes her chances of ever getting the top job.  Much of that scene, which mines tensions from every corner of the table, is shot handheld, with the camera swerving around backs and shoulders to find the milk of the drama.  That is apart from one instance, just before Shiv torpedoes her good standing.  She is flustered by her father’s evasive answers, and lurching towards doing something drastic.  A steadicam shot finds her in that state of decision, a slow zoom creeping towards her.  The table felt cramped with awkwardness, but now seems vast.  Shiv looks alone in the frame.  Many artists like to self-impose their own rules or structures, often as the battle in the creative process is separating purpose from indulgence.  The practice of Dogme 95 was championing the lean and the uncommercial, but it was also founded with a firm awareness of its own pretensions.  Festen broke from the rules – in fact nearly every film made under the manifesto did – but only did so for a very clear purpose.  The visual language of Succession carried its own rules, favoring an unpolished, vérité style, so the brief use of steadicam – this specific shot is no longer than five seconds – becomes all the more striking.  It feels like there is another watcher at the feast, instilled with a prescience for the larger tragedy, leaning towards Shiv, galling her to play her part.  

Armstrong has a fine talent for finding random punctuations of awkwardness.  The dialogue of Succession is not too far removed from The Thick of It in terms of style; everyone is sharp-witted and eloquent, but they are all liable to stumble through their words; they are inexpressive as much as they are expressive.  Cousin Greg – cousin of Olly Reeder and Veep’s lanky monster, Jonah Ryan – whirred with high-wired, panicked gibberish (“if it is to be said, so it be, so it is”), whilst Logan Roy reserved his scowling intelligence behind grunts and sighs, making it all the more thrilling when he would finally draw powder from the armory.  Logan’s rant to Kendall in the pilot is pure cyanide: “you make your own reality, and once you’ve done it, everyone’s of the opinion it was all so fucking obvious”.  Not a word is wasted.  The scripts maintained a certain spontaneity – bolstered in part by the occasional improvisation from the cast – to match the show’s fly-on-the-wall aesthetic.  Every quick exchange came with a palimpsest of “ums” and “ahs”.  Kendall Roy often required a few goes to rev-up his own articulacy, and was equally prone to losing confidence with a firm opinion as soon as the latter made contact with air.  After he suggests throwing his brother-in-law under the bus, in Season 2 finale “This is Not For Tears”, he stammers out of the conjecture he swaggered in with: “look, I don’t know, I’m saying this but I don’t believe it, I’m saying it because this is the time… we’re all saying things”.  Many words are wasted, because Kendall is not his father; he just speaks, in the hope of picking up clarity along the way.  

There were giddy breaks in this unauthored style; crystals of compact lyricism amongst the more doggerel back-and-forth.  Tom Wambsgans was a dear, dangerous buffoon, and there may not be a funnier line in the series than in “Term Haven” when he tries to deflect pointed questions to his track record by looking at his plate and declaring: “King of edible leaves, his majesty the spinach”.  The show rarely played its hand as a straight drama, but the penultimate, funeral set episode “Church and State” was a royal flush.  Shiv Roy’s line about her father – “he couldn’t fit a whole woman in his head” – achieves the ideals of good poetry, where ordinary words are fitted together to form a phrase that means more than it should.  Likewise, Uncle Ewan’s glowering sermon was off to the races; “he was a man who has, here and there, drawn in the edges of the world”.  It’s the closest Succession came to proper, sweeping tragedy, and even then there was a careful balance at play; Ewan’s thunderous turn of phrase is weighed out by the quieter admission; “I loved him, I suppose.  And, I suppose, some of you did too, in whatever way he would let us”.

Succession’s stylistic balance sometimes threw off its own audience.  This would become evident before the end of each season, when speculation would rage about what might happen in the finale.  “Will Logan die?” “Will Kendall commit suicide?” “Will Greg take over the company?” All questions that encompassed a larger enquiry of how Succession sat as a drama, in a post Game of Thrones era where it’s de rigueur to kill off a member of the ensemble every so often, to invoke a sense of narrative brutality.  Armstrong, however, only retained one of the Dogme 95 rules for Succession: “the film must not contain superficial action (murders, weapons, etc. must not occur)”.  Kendall’s fate was secured by these terms.  Families of the stock, wealth, and power of the Roys aren’t so much bloodlines as firms, and leaving the firm is near impossible.  The show rests on him never settling on an exit strategy; lose Kendall and you lose the drama.  It goes back to the notion of things as they are, and how a real life equivalent to Kendall would, even if they suffered the most tremendous public humiliation (naming no names), never be fully prepared to leave the picture.  Far sadder than his self-destruction was Kendall’s self-delusion; right until the end, he still thought he could take the kingdom.  

The fourth season did see a big dramatic twist, as Logan finally vacated his throne, but any melodramatic urges were firmly resisted.  Instead, a queasy, near thirty minute sequence played out in which the Roy children – and, vitally, the audience – wavered between disbelief and acceptance, never quite losing the suspicion that a dark trick was being played, and Logan might leap up and bark at them in bitter triumph.  It was a sly puncturing of expectation, with Brian Cox poised for perhaps a more classical send-off (“look on her, look, her lips/ look there, look there!” springs to mind) than a stroke in an airplane bathroom.  The map for Logan’s death is found in the opening credits, in the final frame where the four children – who may or may not be the Roys, the debate still rages on various forums – watch their father slope away from a family photograph.  They never get the full image of their father, and so it is in death, with his body never explicitly shown.  Just like the sloping figure of the credits, he becomes a shadow.  Again it’s a matter of access; the audience reaches Logan through his children, and if they were absent for his final moments then so are we.  An operatic death scene would not have been in keeping with the spirit of the show.  It played true to the core of Festen, where tragedy always comes second in a joust against reality.  (Or even to the core of Peep Show, when supporting character Gerard suddenly dies of flu, and Mark briefly considers the fleeting nature of life before panicking about his mobile tariff).  The Roy children would have wanted a nobler ending for their father, but reality has him circling above Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, most likely already dead as they crackle a hurried goodbye via speaker phone.  

An equivocal moment in Festen would be the famous scene where eldest son Christian recounts the years of sexual abuse he received from his father in the form of a birthday toast.  What follows is a glorious anti-climax, where the guests sit in brief silence, and then another toast is made, and then the party just continues.  Christian goes in all-guns blazing, and is drowned out by baffled awkwardness.  It is drama without reward and without barriers; there is nothing to stop Christian falling further.  Life cannot offer Christian a firm resolution to his trauma, only more banalities.  For all the critical comparisons to Shakespeare, Succession kept these banalities in check.  The Roy children positioned themselves as schemers and power-brokers, but this was not House of Cards; they were not ruined by grand hubristic gestures but by small, petty moments of ego or plain stupidity.  With Shiv it was her outburst at dinner, with Roman – an always nimble Keiran Culkin – it was an unfortunate mixup with a dick pic.  They have been playing for an empire, but the other employees at Waystar were just going to work.  This is never more apparent than when Kendall finally loses the CEO role for good in “With Open Eyes”.  All his time spent switching sides against various family members – like the Duke of Clarence in the War of the Roses – to claim his “birthright”, all comes crumbling down when Vice-Chairman Frank Venron tells him bluntly: “Ken, it’s done… you don’t have it”.  For the others gathered in that room, it was purely a transaction.  For Kendall it’s the loss of his life’s purpose, yet he is still unspared; he nods his denial to the lift and then another employee sneaks in with him.  There’s no catharsis, only continuation.  In the words of Malcolm Tucker; “it doesn’t matter”.  

There has yet to be another filmmaking movement on the scale of Dogme 95, although its campaign against artifice could only go so far.  It attempted to undo the natural rhythms of drama, and the notion of plot as a thing molded from other works, instead maintaining a constant tension between drama and truth.  Remove high drama – as Sherlock Holmes removes the impossible from his deductions – and what’s left is uncertain human behaviour.  Contemporary reviewers struggled to fit Festen into a genre, but the most commonly applied term was “black comedy”, which only gets the half of it.  Despite its propensity for shock value, there is a deep humanity to it, purely because it dares to see its characters as people, and people rarely make sense.  Festen and Succession both frightened off a certain crowd with a caustic tone often confused for nihilism, but it isn’t nihilism that bonds these works, it’s empathy; empathy for impulse, empathy for narcissism, empathy for cowardice, empathy for self-sabotage.  They make you feel it.  People loved Succession because it tracked a bunch of pretenders – even if they were exorbitantly wealthy – who had wrongly cast themselves in a sort of highbrow American soap of King Lear.  They stumbled their lines, they overestimated themselves, they climbed, they fell, and in the end they were just children playing dress-up, and the adult business world will merrily proceed without them. 

In other words, it’s “Dallas meets Festen”.