HBO’s flagship drama Succession came to an end on Sunday night. The tale of the Roy saga was heavily based on the Murdoch family, to the point that Rupert Murdoch’s divorce agreement from his fourth wife Jerry Hall stipulated that she would be barred from providing plot points to the show’s writers.
But how close is the fiction to reality? Spectator chairman Andrew Neil — who spent over a decade as editor of one of Murdoch’s top newspapers — joins Freddy Gray on Spectator TV to discuss.
“There was enough of an overlap to make it interesting, and enough of an overlap to say, ‘yeah, that’s happened in real life, that’s the kind of thing that goes on,’ but not enough to give the lawyers at HBO palpitations,” Andrew says. He describes how Logan Roy “ran his company like a king. He didn’t run it like a CEO or a chairman, or anything like that, he ran it like a king, and all the executives around him were courtiers. That’s exactly how Rupert Murdoch has run his company.”
Watch the full episode below:
