Drawing The Season Finale of Succession

Ambition, power, wit and betrayal

I’ve live-drawn many things over the past six years since I discovered this digital form of journalism. The other night, I decided to live draw a scripted television show, which I did only once before during the Mad Men show finale. The series I drew the other night was the season finale of Succession, a dark— and somewhat comedic— fictional series about a media mogul and his adult children. It’s beautifully acted and written, and is very wordy. It is hard to draw for the wordy reason as well as the speed with which the camera moves around; not always conducive to a coherent visual piece. Plus, as the episode progresses, I have no idea what will happen and what moments will be key points in the narrative. I don’t feel I did it justice, but I drew what I could and tweeted it out in real time. Many of my twitter followers seemed to enjoy what I was doing, even if they don’t follow the series. May have sold some prints, and I even got followed by one of the actors (whom I didn’t draw during that show, as good as she was).

My live-drawing is partly about connecting and sharing things that we all (or many of us) are experiencing. As a cartoonist who loves pop culture and storytelling, I was aware that this show was very popular with a large number of people, hence I thought it might be fun to live-draw it.

What is our fascination with people like the family in this show? Everyone watching agrees that they are horrible people. For me, its a timeless story, it’s about desire and ambition, fear of death, fear of irrelevancy….its about family—which is universal— and the dialogue is is acute and witty. The story tells us about ourselves in this particular time we live in, even if we are nicer people than the Roys.

Below are the drawings. The first one, above, is of a few of the main actors and was done just before the show was aired.