Succession and the Murdochs: Tighten your shoelaces for the next twist in the family saga

News that Rupert Murdoch and wife Jerry Hall have bought a $200 million (€177 million) Montana cattle ranch off the mega-wealthy Koch family has prompted some understandable confusion. Haven't we had the ranch episode already?

Back in season one, wasn’t a giant American ranch the setting for a media mogul family therapy weekend that then proceeded to the vicious exchange of accusation and counter-accusation?

Succession, the HBO dynasty drama that has just finished its third season, is not about the Murdochs, of course. It's a tragicomedy for which creator Jesse Armstrong has merged the biographies of a valley of moguls with Shakespeare to invent the whole new monstrosity of Logan Roy (Brian Cox), his over-privileged adult children and a private jet full of hangers-on.

Waystar Royco, the show's troubled family business, is a media and entertainment conglomerate with a parks and cruises division and streaming aspirations. Structurally, it is closer to Disney of five years ago than Murdoch's current entities News Corp and Fox Corporation.

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And yet the original inspiration for Succession – the ever-twisting story of which child can succeed Murdoch, if any of them, and what it will cost them to try – is hard to forget when watching it.

The parallels are there in each sniff of ideological and temperamental difference between Logan and his progeny. They’re there in every reference to Waystar Royco’s news network ATN (the show’s version of Fox News). And they’re there in the amusingly frequent insinuations that Waystar Royco is an analogue beast that can’t speak fluent digital – so there might not be a business to inherit anyway.

“We’re flying like a f***ing rocket ship and you’re sinking like a lead balloon,” tech billionaire Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård) tells Logan in the season finale when Waystar Royco’s market capitalisation plunges after a “historic” Department of Justice fine for an unsavoury and long-running cruise ships scandal.

GoJo, Matsson’s video streamer, might not have the content that Waystar owns, but as he was earlier heard slagging Roman Roy (Kieran Culkin), at least it doesn’t take 30 seconds to load a page.

Strong profile

Overt Murdoch DNA surfaced again last week in a New Yorker profile of actor Jeremy Strong that recounted how he learned from Michael Wolff's biography of Rupert Murdoch that second son James Murdoch laces his shoes extremely tightly. This "told Strong something about his 'inner tensile strength' " and compelled him to audition for the role of Kendall Roy with "shoes tied tight".

It’s an interesting detail, in part because Strong is interesting, and in part because James Murdoch is too.

Strong’s physical intensity is just the start of it: traces of James, who in his youth bankrolled a hip-hop record label before joining the family business, are also evident in Kendall’s penchant for rap. James Murdoch, more than Rupert, haunts the series, and the series haunts James Murdoch – if only because he keeps being asked if he’s seen it.

“There are some shows that you just know you are never going to watch,” he said in 2019. “I’ve never felt that comfortable drawing any parallels, because I don’t feel as if I live solely in a needy orbit of approval or whatever from the charismatic megafauna,” he told The New York Times a year later. “Not at all. I’m entirely my own person.”

Just like Kendall is entirely his own person.

But while his screen counterpart fumbles every escape bid, James Murdoch has made a definitive break for it. In 2020, while the pandemic kept Succession off air, he resigned from the board of News Corp citing “disagreements over certain editorial content”.

Dispersing doubt

Having declared that he and wife Kathryn Murdoch were “disappointed” with its Australian outlets’ climate denial while bushfires raged, he followed this post-resignation by expressing a diluted version of the queasiness others feel when confronted with the spectre of Fox News. It would be better, he implied, if its mission was “to introduce fact to disperse doubt – not to sow doubt to obscure fact, if you will”.

This is now the third decade of the Murdoch boardroom saga and, as in Succession, it's not a question of rooting for anyone exactly. The second decade saw UK media regulator Ofcom criticise James Murdoch for his conduct as chief executive and chairman of News Corp in Europe and Asia during the unsavoury and long-running phone-hacking scandal.

But while Armstrong believes Succession must keep the patriarchal Logan alive as “the planet, the sun they all revolve around”, the answer to who succeeds Rupert (90) is unlikely to be settled until after his death.

James’s older and more conservative brother Lachlan is the son in situ as chairman and chief executive of Fox Corporation. The speculation goes, however, that when Rupert dies, an alliance could form between James, sister Elisabeth and half-sister Prudence, giving them control of how the family trust votes in matters relating to News Corp and Fox.

Shrunken empire

Rupert Murdoch, meanwhile, may not be willing to sell up to the extent that Logan apparently is, but his empire has shrunk in recent years through the offloading of film studio 20th Century Fox and other entertainment assets to Disney.

In Succession’s third season, a key line is one character’s observation that he’s “never seen Logan get f***ed once”. Instinctively, many will feel the same about Rupert Murdoch. But he has chalked up the odd defeat, not least in 2018 when he was outbid by US telecoms giant Comcast in the race to acquire Sky, the company he built and had more than once tried to buy in full.

So what next? “You can’t become a tech player because you and your business are too f***ing old,” Matsson bluntly informs Logan Roy.

But that’s the sweary fictional stuff again. In real life, sprinkling loose change on a rural mega-getaway seems like a pretty standard element of the endgame. Murdoch’s Montana acquisition is not his first rodeo on the ranch score, but it is by far his biggest: the 340,000-acre property known as Beaverhead, near Yellowstone National Park, features elk, antelope and mule deer, plus a 45km river for trout fishing.

It sounds like it could be pleasant – as long as nobody gets any ideas about family therapy sessions, and those climate change heatwaves don’t get too much.