HBO’s Succession wrapped up what could be seen as the “final” final portion of its final season duties last Sunday night, when it descended on the 75th Primetime Emmy Awards like a cleansing rain, smacking statues away from Bob Odenkirk’s grasping hands, and just generally kicking the shit out of everybody. (Except The Bear; we were spared that confrontation thanks to some largely arbitrary rules that declare Succession, one of the wittiest shows in recent memories, a drama, while Christopher Storer’s Chicago-set rolling panic attack is a “comedy.” But we digress.)
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Series creator Jesse Armstrong was on hand to pick up statues, watch his friends pick up statues, and presumably take in a bit of Brian Cox’s apparently unending performance art piece as Logan Roy; this also meant he’s been forced to field some questions about the idea of Succession spin-offs or sequels recently, which he shot down in the clearest language possible, thank Christ.
To wit: When asked by BBC Radio’s Today this week about the possibility of returning to the Roys any time soon, Armstrong made it clear that he and his writing team have “written them enough now,” and that returning to the show “doesn’t feel like the most interesting thing to me.” (Apologies to anyone holding out for The Wambsgans, a heartwarming family sitcom we just came up with, set deep within the depths of the screaming domestic hell Shiv Roy ends the series trapped inside.)
In fact, Armstrong sounds like he’s really enjoying this period of being the guy who created the most celebrated show on TV, before people get very serious about those pesky “What comes next?” questions. “I have no clue,” he said when asked about future projects. “And I’m really quite comfortable with that. I’ve got a few ideas, but they’re in that delicious stage where I haven’t done any proper work on them and they all seem like they’ll be absolutely perfect. So I’m enjoying a sort of long tail of not doing the show but being happy to have done it.”
(For what it’s worth, all of this maps pretty closely to recent comments from HBO president Casey Bloys, who told Variety last week that “The chances of that are pretty unlikely” when asked similar questions, noting that Armstrong “told the story he wanted to tell.”)