SERIELAND COULISSE - "Succession" is surely one of the most successful series of recent years.
This is due to the staging, to the acting, but above all to the dialogues… However, they have not all been written.
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A battle to take the head of a media empire, vulgar, cynical characters that we love to hate, chiseled dialogues… This week, in SERIELAND, Clémence Olivier takes you behind the scenes of a brilliant series: "Succession".
Succession
is a series that blew me away.
It tells the story of the battle between the children of a press magnate who dream of becoming the head of this empire.
The staging, the acting are neat.
And the millimeter dialogues… Well that's what I thought.
Because the output of the characters, scathing, impactful, realistic, were in fact not all written.
Some dialogues of the series are even totally improvised… Like this dinner for the birthday of Logan Roy, the patriarch, in the first season.
This recourse to improvisation, we owe it to a man, one of the conductors of this series, Adam McKay.
He was the one who directed the first episode of
Succession.
He is also one of the producers of the series imagined by Jesse Armstrong.
But his favorite register is comedy.
He studied improvisation and wrote for years for Saturday Night Live (SNL), an American comedy show.
So when he's directing actors and actresses, McKay seeks roughness, he wants to create the moment that you don't expect, whether it's in a TV sketch or in an episode of Succession.
And for that, his technique is therefore to push the actors to improvise.
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But you don't direct Brian Cox, who plays Logan Roy, like you direct an SNL actor who is familiar with comedy.
In fact, the actors of
Succession
for the most part have a classical training.
They used to follow their lines to the letter.
So when McKay asks them to improvise, they are initially taken aback, some even refuse to play the game!
This is the case with Kieran Culkin.
He plays Roman, the youngest of the brothers in the series.
In
Vulture,
he says he was terrified of improvising.
He even asked the director to be excused.
Without success of course.
But the director did not rush him so far.
He took her by the hand.
He encouraged him, he continued take after take to throw lines at him that the actor had to grab on the fly.
And miraculously, Culkin ended up worshiping.
Like the entire cast for that matter.
On the screen, these improvisational moments fit perfectly with the more written dialogues.
They are impossible to detect.
However, it is improvised when Roman is offended to see a Democratic senator invited to his sister's wedding and lets loose an obscenity.
It's in the 9th episode of the 1st season.
Extract
When I hear these lines burst forth, I tell myself that the actors are really super talented but also that this way of working has brought a lot to the series.
After all, it is this spontaneity that makes the series realistic, which also gives it another rhythm.
So much so that it almost sometimes feels like a documentary about the Murdochs or one of the rich families from which Jesse Armstrong was inspired.
(Transcription)
Succession
It's a series in 2 seasons (soon three)
There are 20 episodes available on the OCS Go platform