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Premise
Succession follows the Roy family, which owns the New York City-based global media conglomerate Waystar RoyCo. Family patriarch Logan Roy announces on his 80th birthday that he is no longer planning to retire. As Logan's health declines, who will succeed him as Waystar RoyCo CEO becomes a question between his children—the power-hungry Kendall, politically savvy Shiv, and irreverent Roman.

Starring

 * Hiam Abbass as Marcia Roy: Logan Roy's third and current wife. Born and raised in Beirut, she is often at odds with Logan's mistrustful children. She has a son, Amir, from her first marriage and a daughter from a previous relationship.
 * Nicholas Braun as Greg Hirsch: The bumbling yet opportunistic grandson of Logan's brother Ewan. Greg is unfamiliar with the rough terrain he must navigate to win Logan over, and finds himself indentured to Tom Wambsgans in his quest for a place at Waystar and with the family.
 * Brian Cox as Logan Roy: The Dundee-born self-made billionaire, founder of media and entertainment conglomerate Waystar RoyCo. He is a brash leader whose primary focus is his company, rather than his four children: Connor, from his first marriage, and Kendall, Roman and Siobhan, from his second marriage. He is married to Marcia, his third wife.
 * Kieran Culkin as Roman Roy: Half-brother to Connor and the middle child from Logan's second marriage. Roman is immature, does not take responsibilities seriously and often finds himself lacking the common sense his father requires of him. This is likely because, as evidenced in many episodes, his father's abuse targeted him. He is frequently at odds with his older brother Kendall and sometimes his sister Shiv, with whom he often vies for power and their father's attention.
 * Peter Friedman as Frank Vernon: COO and later vice-chairman of Waystar RoyCo, and longtime confidant of Logan. Frank is a member of Logan's old guard, on whom Kendall frequently relies to help win back Logan's favor. He is Kendall's mentor and godfather, and is disliked by Roman.
 * Natalie Gold as Rava Roy: Kendall's former wife and mother of his two children, Sophie and Iverson.
 * Matthew Macfadyen as Tom Wambsgans: Shiv's husband who is a Waystar executive running ATN, the company's global news outlet. He enjoys his proximity to the Roy family's power, but is frequently dismissed by the family's inner circle. He ingratiates himself with those more powerful than he, but torments his hapless subordinate Greg.
 * Alan Ruck as Connor Roy: The only child from Logan's first marriage. Mostly removed from corporate affairs, he defers to his half-siblings on most firm-related matters and resides at a ranch in New Mexico with his younger girlfriend Willa. He is prone to delusions of grandeur and "had an interest in politics from a young age." Similar to his half-siblings, Connor does not have the best recollections of his childhood, as he mentioned that he went three years without seeing Logan when he was a child.
 * Sarah Snook as Siobhan "Shiv" Roy: Logan's youngest child and only daughter. A left-leaning political fixer, she worked for a time for presidential candidate Gil Eavis, whose political views clash with Waystar. She eventually leaves politics to focus on building a future at Waystar. She is engaged to and then marries Tom, but their relationship is undermined by Shiv's infidelity.
 * Jeremy Strong as Kendall Roy: Half-brother to Connor and the eldest child from Logan's second marriage. As Logan's heir apparent, Kendall struggles to prove his worth to his father after battling substance abuse and bungling major deals. He toils to maintain a relationship with his siblings, ex-wife Rava, and their children.
 * Rob Yang as Lawrence Yee: The founder of the media website Vaulter that is acquired by Waystar RoyCo. He holds great contempt for Waystar and Kendall in particular, with whom he is often at odds.

Guest starring

 * Dagmara Domińczyk as Karolina Novotney: the head of public relations for Waystar RoyCo and a member of the company's legal team.
 * Justine Lupe as Willa Ferreyra: Connor's younger girlfriend who is a former call girl and an aspiring playwright.
 * David Rasche as Karl Muller: Waystar RoyCo's CFO and member of the company's legal team.
 * J. Smith-Cameron as Gerri Kellman: the general counsel to Waystar RoyCo, who is also godmother to Shiv. She becomes a mentor figure to Roman, with whom she also shares a secret sexual connection.
 * Arian Moayed as Stewy Hosseini: Kendall's friend from the Buckley School and Harvard who is now a private-equity investor with a seat on Waystar's board. He is covertly in partnership with Logan's rival Sandy Furness.
 * Larry Pine as Sandy Furness: the owner of a rival media conglomerate and a longtime enemy of Logan. He is in partnership with Stewy and backs his private-equity fund, Maesbury Capital.
 * James Cromwell as Ewan Roy: brother of Logan Roy and grandfather of Greg Hirsch.
 * Eric Bogosian as Gil Eavis: a Democratic Party presidential candidate who is U.S. senator for the state of Pennsylvania. Eavis has a longtime vendetta against Logan Roy and Waystar for their media ownership consolidation and takeovers of local news networks.
 * Ashley Zukerman as Nate Sofrelli: political strategist and aide to Gil Eavis.
 * Caitlin FitzGerald as Tabitha Hayes
 * Harriet Walter as Lady Caroline Collingwood: Logan Roy's second wife and mother to Kendall, Shiv and Roman. Collingwood is a Waystar RoyCo shareholder.
 * Molly Griggs as Grace: Roman's girlfriend

Co-starring

 * Swayam Bhatia as Sophie Roy: Kendall Roy's daughter
 * Quentin Morales as Iverson Roy: Kendall Roy's son
 * Juliana Canfield as Jess Jordan: Kendall's assistant.
 * Scott Nicholson as Colin Stiles: Logan's body man

Development
On June 6, 2016, it was announced that HBO had given the production a pilot order. The table read with the cast for the series pilot took place in Manhattan on November 8, 2016, the day of the U.S. presidential election in which Donald Trump won. The series pilot, which was directed by Adam McKay and written by Jesse Armstrong, was filmed in fall 2016.

On February 8, 2017, it was announced that HBO had given the production a series order for a first season consisting of ten episodes. The previously announced creative team continued their involvement as the series entered into production. A writers' room was assembled in Brixton, London after the series order was given which included Lucy Prebble, Georgia Pritchett, Tony Roche and Jon Brown who had worked with creator Jesse Armstrong on satirical comedies Veep and The Thick of It. The writers conversed wealth consultants to factcheck their portrayal of the ultra-wealthy Roy family. One thing that was changed in the scripts as a result was that Logan Roy's wife Marcia would no longer cook a turkey herself during Thanksgiving.

On April 26, 2018, the series premiere date was offically set for June 3, 2018.

Writing
The characterisation of Roman Roy underwent changes throughout the series pilot and first season. In the pilot of Succession, Roman was portrayed as having a wife and child and actor Kieran Culkin was wearing his actual wedding ring in the pilot. That changed after the show was picked up by HBO where Roman would now have a girlfriend and his girlfriend had a child from a previous relationship. Grace, the character played by Molly Griggs, was originally listed as "Grace Roy". Before shooting the pilot, Culkin was also informed that his character's possible sexual orientation may not be entirely heterosexual or monogamous. Allusions to Roman's sexual orientation remained in the series with references to his personal trainer.

Casting
On October 6, 2016, Brian Cox, Jeremy Strong, Sarah Snook, Kieran Culkin, Nicholas Braun and Matthew Macfayden were announced to be cast as leads in the series pilot. During the casting process, Kieran Culkin was originally sent to read for the role of Greg but he didn't feel it was the right fit for him and he instead requested to read for Roman. What grabbed Culkin about the "fun" character of Roman was his introduction in the script where he walks into the room and says "hey, hey motherfuckers".

In season one, Justine Lupe was cast in a recurring guest role as Willa Ferreyra, the much younger girlfiend of Connor Roy. Lupe said that her character Willa was originally supposed to only appear in 3 episodes before she parts ways with Connor Roy in "Austerlitz". The scheduled breakup in "Austerlitz" was removed following script rewrites for the episode and the character continued to appear in subsequent episodes and seasons.

Juliana Canfield originally auditioned for the role of Willa Ferreyra but the role ended up going to Lupe. A week after auditioning for Willa, Canfield was called back by casting directors to audition for a role named Jay who is a political aide to Shiv when she became involved in Democratic Party politics with Gil Eavis. The actress received a call that the role of Jay was cancelled, but she was requested to play a new character named Jess who would be the assistant to Kendall. Canfield was cast as Jess Jordan in 2017 as she was graduating from the Yale School of Drama.

Filming
The series pilot for Succession was filmed in fall 2016 with Adam McKay directing and Andrij Parekh as cinematographer. In defining the look of Succession, Parekh used Barry Ackroyd's work on McKay's The Big Short as a reference point. Succession was shot on 3-perf 35mm film using the Kodak Vision3 500T 5219 film stock which is optimized for both daylight and tungsten lighting. McKay was "adamant from the start that Succession must be shot on film and pushed that through with the producers" according to cinematographer Andrij Parekh. The reason McKay wanted to shoot on film rather than digital was to give the show a "dirter" and "more textured" look compared to the pristine images from photographing on a digital camera. Parekh used Arri's Arriflex 35BL film cameras with Angenieux 24-290mm lenses that offer up to 12x zoom using an f/2.5–T2.8 aperture and Angenieux Optimo 45-120mm lenses with an f/2.6 aperture for fast zooms.

Principal photography on the 10 episodes in the first season of Succession began in October 2017. Andrij Parek served as cinematographer on episodes 1-3. Patrick Capone took over from Parekh as cinematographer on episodes 4, 5, 7, 9 and 10, and Christopher Norr on episodes 6 and 8. Capone and Norr continued the visual language for Succession that was established by Parekh such as using the same Kodak 500T 5219 film stock. Succession is shot in a 1/43:1 aspect ratio using primarily handheld cameras and zooms, inspired by the Dogme 95 movement. Handheld camera movements are intended to imitate mockumentaries where the camera follows the characters rather than being stationary. The observational style of characters gives the audience a fly-on-the-wall perspective. Patrick Capone characterized the series' camerawork as "voyeuristic" and "non-cinema[tic]", relying on natural light, close coverage and frequent zooms to evoke the feeling of "eavesdropping" upon the characters and their environments. The fly-on-the-wall perspective allows the camera to react to what is happening in front of the lens. In order to fully cover dialogue scenes with multiple cameras, a multiple-camera setup was used.

The first season of Succession was primarily filmed in New York City locations with additional locations in New Jersey, New Mexico and the United Kingdom. In New York City, the American Irish Historical Society on Fifth Avenue served as the location for Logan Roy's apartment. The exterior of Waystar-RoyCo's headquarters was represented by 28 Liberty Street. Interiors for WayStar RoyCo were filmed at the World Trade Center towers 4 and 7.

The second episode, titled "Shit Show at the Fuck Factory", was filmed at New York City's Bellevue Hospital.

Third episode, titled "Lifeboats", largely takes place inside Logan Roy's apartment and the Waystar-RoyCo office

Fourth episode "Sad Sack Wasp Trap" was filmed in Manhattan's Cunard Building on 25 Broadway, where Cipriani S.A. is housed which was the venue for the episode's gala.

Eighth episode "Prague" used the East New York Freight Tunnel as the entrance to the club where Tom Wambsgans' bachelor party takes place.

In January 2018, production for the seventh episode "Austerlitz" moved from New York to New Mexico. Filming primarily took place at the 190-acre Rancho Alegre in Santa Fe. On February 22, 2018, filming took place in New Jersey, which required the closing of the Atlantic City-Brigantine tunnel.

Production on the final two episodes of season one moved to the United Kingdom. On February 25, 2018, filming for Shiv and Tom's wedding took place at Eastnor Castle in Herefordshire, England. Eastnor Castle is often used as a real-life wedding locale. The final episode's underwater lake scene following the car crash, in which Kendall escapes from the car wreckage, was filmed in a giant water tank at Pinewood Studios. Prior to filming, actor Jeremy Strong had never taken part in a significant on-screen stunt before. According to Capone, some members of the crew wanted to shoot the underwater sequences digitally with the assumption that the process would be quicker. A second camera was ready but was never used and instead the underwater sequences were entrely shot on film. Filming for the exterior shots of the lake was done at the Victoria Lake near Pinewood Studios.

Post-production
The post-production processing of the film stock for the series pilot was done by the FotoKem film laboratory in Los Angeles. By the time the full series had gone into production, film was processed and developed at the newly-launched Kodak Film Lab in New York City. Scenes shot for the final two episodes in the UK were processed at the British lab Cinelab. The captured 35mm film stock was scanned at 4K resolution for post-production editing.

Composition
On November 17, 2017, it was reported that Nicholas Britell would serve as the series' composer. Britell had previously collaborated with McKay on The Big Short (2015) and Vice (2018), though Succession was the first television series that he had composed a score for. Britell visited the set where the pilot was filming in 2016. Watching the filming of a fight scene between the family patriarch Logan Roy and his son Kendall enabled Britell to experience "subconsciously kind of taking things in about the frequency of the show". McKay and Armstrong were invited to Britell's studio where they were played a chord progression that Britell said "felt very, very 1700s" and it was this chord progression that would eventually become the Succession main theme. In composing the score for the first season, Britell wanted the show's dark classical music to reflect a "mixture of absurdity and seriousness" where the show addresses the subject of increased concentrations of wealth and power among fewer people while also acknowledging the delusions of grandeur held by members of the Roy family.

At the 2019 Emmy Awards, Britell won the award for Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music for his Succession main theme.

Soundtrack
Succession: Season 1 (HBO Original Series Soundtrack) is the soundtrack to the first season of the television series, released on August 9, 2019 by Milan Records. The album was preceded by the single—the main title theme, released earlier on July 2018.

Release
The complete first season of Succession was released on DVD by Warner Bros. on August 6, 2018, which included special features. A Blu-ray release was made available on November 6 of the same year. The Blu-ray release came on November 6, 2018. To date, it is the only season of Succession to be released on Blu-ray. Season 1 was included as part of the Succession: The Complete Series DVD boxset, released on September 12, 2023.