December 20, 2024

The irresistible truth of Jesse Armstrong

Jesse Armstrong’s writing credits include Peep Show, The Thick Of It, Black Mirror, Veep, and Succession.

This post is about his irresistible truth as a writer.

And there’s some bonus stuff about the irresistible tone of Succession.

An instance when “North Star” doesn’t sound glib

I listened to Armstrong in conversation with Hattie Crisell on her In Writing podcast.

He talks a lot about tone. He talks more about tone than he does about ideas, which surprised me at first, until I realised that, to him, tone is the idea. Tone is his North Star, as they say (and I try not to but just did.) But the idea of a North Star doesn’t sound glib when you listen to Armstrong talk about tone.

He’s talking to Crisell about tone when he says this:

One way of thinking about things that I write is it's a documentary about people who are not real.

Jesse Armstrong

This is a man speaking his truth. Read the quote then replay in your head the shows for which he’s famous, and you’ll recognise it as the Truth with an upper-case T.

Writing documentaries about people who are not real is Armstrong’s irresistible truth. It’s his big idea. It’s his USP. And it’s his aesthetic. He himself describes it as his guiding tone. He describes how it acts as a strategy for storytelling, informing his choices:

That's a tone I find quite appealing. It helps you maybe not put too much exposition in. An engaged audience enjoys the process of putting together the story from the pieces they're shown.

Jesse Armstrong

The irresistible truth comes in many forms. For Armstrong the truth is his tone. But what he calls tone sounds more like an idea to me: “I write documentaries about people who are not real.” That’s an idea.

I think we’re both right. It’s an idea that imposes constraints on the tone of its execution; good, useful constraints; tight but liberating constraints. It’s an idea that makes certain aspects of tone inevitable.

It’s impressive when someone knows what they’re about. (And the same goes for brands by the way.) Armstrong knows who he is and what he’s about as a writer. He’s nailed his irresistible truth.

No gap to mind

I lost myself for a while down an enjoyable and edifying Jesse Armstrong rabbit hole. And it was striking how other people told a very similar truth about Armstrong to the one that he tells about himself.

Reflecting on his interview with Armstrong for the Guardian, Andrew Anthony makes this observation:

Succession managed to build such an enormously compelling and tonally distinct universe, with its ferocious boardroom spats, private jet meetings and riotously scathing exchanges, that it felt less created than discovered in the end, as if Armstrong didn’t imagine the scenarios but merely pulled the curtain back to reveal them.

Andrew Anthony

Phrases like, “less created than discovered” and, “didn’t imagine the scenarios but merely pulled the curtain back to reveal them,” are descriptions of documentary-style storytelling.

In this Radio 4 Profile of Armstrong, the Peep Show actor, Isy Suttie, talks about Armstrong’s knack for, “capturing the brutality and despair of being human”. That’s documentary territory too.

There’s no “brand gap” for Jesse Armstrong it seems. His “brand” as he sees it, and his brand as other people see it, are remarkably similar.

The tone is the (nebulous) truth

I am staunchly ambivalent about tone of voice. It’s the unbroken stallion of advertising creativity: powerful, beautiful, and both of those things because it’s untamed. You have to get the tone right, but tone is nigh on impossible to define in high-fidelity language.

There’s a similar ambivalence when Crisell and Armstrong discuss tone. She works with tone for a living and yet audibly struggles to ask a useful question about it. Armstrong is sympathetic because he gets how hazy the subject of tone can be. In the end Crisell starts the conversation with this statement:

I mean, we all know what tone is, but it is quite a nebulous thing…

Hattie Crisell

“Exactly,” says Armstrong in response.

And yet, for Armstrong, the tone is the truth of his shows. It's a nebulous thing and yet it can’t be allowed to be.

Tone is the elusive thing that I chase… it's quite a problem at the heart of your project if it doesn't have a consistent tone.

Jesse Armstrong

Having read and listened to several interviews in which Armstrong discusses his craft, this pressing need to find the tone of a show is a recurring theme.

So is the innately nebulous nature of the quest.

Crisell asks where the tone of Succession came from and at what point did Armstrong know that he had it. The short answer is that he’s not entirely sure where it came from. He explains that tone can come from something as small and fragile as a single line, or a look, or the temperature of a particular scene in a pilot.

He also acknowledges that the tone of Succession varies from episode to episode, and from scene to scene, just as tone of voice varies from execution to execution in an advertising campaign, even if we tell ourselves it doesn’t. (It does.)

Nonetheless there is an “übertone” (my word not his) that defines any show, and this is the Holy Grail of screenwriting as far as Armstrong is concerned. He struggles to define the übertone of Succession even though he’s intimately familiar it:

I can't really say what the keynote of that tone was, apart from maybe a certain sort of pitilessness.

Jess Armstrong

I was happy with this. For me, the defining feature of Succession is that none of its main characters have any redeeming features. It’s impossible to root for any of them across the entirety of the show. You might root for one of them over the others in a particular episode, although even that’s difficult.

I’ll take “pitilessness” as the irresistible truth of Succession.

One tone to rule them all

I wrote about the inconsistent tone of voice of the Levi’s 501 campaign, arguably one of the most consistent campaigns of all time.

Whilst each ad had a (wildly) different tone of voice, the campaign was held together by a consistent brand idea: namely “sexy rebellion”.

Armstrong would describe that as the “tone” of the campaign. Sexy rebellion was the übertone of Levi’s 501 advertising.

And while each episode of Succession varies in tone between dark humour and pathetic tragedy, the pitiless übertone is always there, ushering the ensemble towards a pitiless conclusion.

If you know what you want to say, and you know the tonal world you're within, then you can have a sense of an ending without knowing the precise configuration of it.

Jesse Armstrong

Armstrong didn’t know from the outset what the ending of Succession would be. In fact he didn’t know until near the end itself. But he did know that the ending would be suitably pitiless. That was the truth. And it was irresistible.

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Whatever your spiritual truth, I hope the next two weeks or so are peaceful, rejuvenating, and sprinkled with joy. Thanks for reading.

Maybe try this too: Magicians and conspirators, a post about conjuring ideas into existence.