SPOILER ALERT: This article contains major spoilers for “Succession” Season 4.
Logan Roy was always going to die.
“I think it’s implicit in the title of the show, isn’t it?” “Succession” scribe Georgia Pritchett rhetorically asked during a recent exclusive interview with Page Six.
“He nearly died in the pilot,” she continued. “We’ve discussed it every season but I think the dynamic between him and the children is just glorious for us to want to do it before now. So we waited till the last season.”
Fans of the HBO drama were gobsmacked last Sunday when the show’s patriarch, Logan Roy (Brian Cox) collapsed and unexpectedly died while on a private jet.
His children — Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) —were forced to listen in on his final moments via speakerphone.
The L.A. Times even published a fictional obituary for the TV tycoon.
Pritchett, who also wrote for “Veep,” says she was pleasantly surprised that no one on the show’s crew or cast spilled the tea of the dramatic turn of events while filming.
“Amazement when you think about how many actors and how many extras and how many crew (members) we have on the show who kept the secret for so long,” she noted. “I’m really proud of everyone. I think everyone was determined that it wouldn’t be spoiled for the viewers.”
In fact, they were so determined that the writers even devised a code name for the bombshell episode involving another HBO star.
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“This was a tough secret to keep! We decided it in the #Succession writers’ room in Jan 22. So nobody found out we used code on the whiteboards. Larry David meant Logan Dies,” Pritchett tweeted earlier this week. “So episode 403 said Connor’s Wedding, Larry David. Mind you, that would also have been a great episode.”
Despite the comedic code name for the episode, the “My Mess Is a Bit of a Life” author shared that writing and filming Logan’s death was a mournful experience.
“I think everyone was incredibly sad,” she said. “There was a genuine sense of sort of grief on set and not just about, you know, that storyline, but about the show ending. And, you know, we wanted it to be a surprise.”
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Pritchett further revealed that Logan’s rather mundane death scene where viewers didn’t even see his body properly was on purpose.
“It’s so tempting with an actor like Brian Cox or with this sort of kingly-like figure … you want to write a huge death scene, but life doesn’t work like that,” she explained. “Life doesn’t give people big death scenes and incredible final words and speeches. So we wanted it to, as always, with everything in the show, [it] to feel as real as possible … We’re all mortal, even Logan.”
As the end of the iconic show looms near, the “Shrink Next Door” writer believes that fans will be “satisfied” with the show’s conclusion.
“I think part of the decision to have it (Logan Roy’s death) happen quite early on in this season — which was a very hard decision to make — was to give ourselves a chance to fully explore ‘Succession’,” she divulged. “Now that the king is dead, you know, before it was hypothetical and what if and who could it be? But now it’s a whole different thing.”
“So I think, yeah, I think that there’s a lot to come, which will be very exciting,” she teased.
A new episode of “Succession” airs every Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on HBO.
