Succession Star Reveal Showrunner Pitched Season 5 to Them

HBO’s Succession ended after four seasons of family/business drama – but a lot of fans thought there could be more. Well, in a new interview Succession star Kieran Culkin talks about how the show ended, while also revealing that showrunner Jesse Armstrong actually has a plan for Season 5 that he pitched to some of the cast and crew. 

Culkin joined Homeland star Claire Danes for an actor-on-actor interview, where he shared the anecdote about plans for Succession Season 5. For a larger context, Culkin was speaking about how there was continuous uncertainty during making Season 4 about whether or not this was truly the end of Succession:

“…Jesse Armstrong, our showrunner-writer, didn’t know. He told me before the season started that he thinks this is the end, but he doesn’t know,” Culkin shared. “I’d actually stopped asking what was coming later. And that was the thing: I liked it. I liked not knowing!”

However, Culkin goes on to say that things changed drastically when shooting on Season 4 began: 

“And then this year, he [Jesse] mentioned that it might be the end before we started shooting, so I started asking him questions. He told me what happens with Logan, and I asked him to break down everything. And he explained the entire season to me. And then when he got to the end, I said, ‘Well, that seems like that’s the end of the show.’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, it does, doesn’t it? Although …’ And then he just started talking about all these different ideas off the top of his head… he was like, ‘This is just off the top of my head.’ And then he just pitched an amazing fifth season and then another and another.”

The hope that Jesse Armstrong inspired the Succession cast actually became something of a wildfire of expectation – until Armstrong himself had to douse it: 

“He kept us guessing the whole time. There were some of us that were so sure that there was not going to be another season. Sarah Snook [Shiv], the entire time, until the very end was like, ‘There’s going to be a fifth season.’ And had very clear ideas on what it was. And it was after the table read for the final episode, he told us.”

For now, it seems like a certainty that Succession is over – but who knows what the future will bring? HBO certainly isn’t keen on letting go of hit shows with franchise potential: Game of Thrones is becoming an expansive universe of prequels and planned sequels, while Mike White’s The White Lotus has become a destination drama anthology in the vein of American Horror Story, which can keep going for just as Ryan Murphy’s series. That’s all to say: while the death of Logan Roy (Brian Cox) kind of makes “Succession” a finished story, HBO can easily take the plans Jesse Armstrong has forward into a sequel series (“Ascension” or “Progression” – whatever). 

For now you can stream all of Succession on Max.