The one-take scenes that made the final season of ‘Succession’ a masterpiece
Few modern works of art truly deserve the title masterpiece, but HBO’s Succession is an outlier. Marking the culmination of the golden age of television, the Shakespearean drama found its footing in intricate dialogue, weaving culture between unrelenting expressions and perfectly timed wit. But the show’s mastery extended far beyond the writers’ room.
Between a stellar ensemble cast, bouts of sit-com-style editing, and a score that fused the cool with the classical, each element of the filmmaking served to elevate the gravitas and tragedy of the Roy family empire. Just as each line of Armstrong’s dialogue feels purposeful and precise, every shot feels calculated to match. This has never been more evident than in the show’s concluding season.
Though the television-making prowess of the Succession cast and crew was obvious from the outset of the pilot, the fourth and final season cemented the show as an all-time great. The crew adopted some particularly innovative filmmaking techniques to enhance the drama of the final ten episodes, which saw the long-awaited fall of patriarch and CEO Logan Roy.
Looking to increase the emotion of two of the most important scenes in the season, an innovative one-take technique was used. As the show was shot on film, meaning each shot was limited to ten minutes, Mark Mylod adapted the cameras to allow the actors to deliver the scene in one take.
This was employed for the scene where the Roy siblings desperately say goodbye to their father on the phone. As the director recalled during an episode of HBO’s ‘Inside the Episode’ series, “The camera operators worked on this idea of basically hiding rolls of film around the set and hiding a third camera body during super fast reloads so that one camera would always be running so they wouldn’t have to reload at the same time.”
The result was one of the most intense scenes in the final season, with the filmmaking technique serving to enhance the desperate emotions of the siblings. “As it turns out, it’s like a 27-minute long scene,” Golden Globe winner Kieran Culkin recalled, “It was us doing like a one-act play on a boat in several rooms with background actors, with lighting everywhere, with three cameras and it was unlike anything I’d ever done before and it was extremely exciting.”
‘Connor’s Wedding’ wasn’t the only episode that called for this method of filmmaking. Mylod used the technique again in the penultimate episode of the entire series, ‘Church and State’, which depicted Logan Roy’s funeral. Hoping to contain as much emotion as possible into the scene, Mylod abandoned their usual two-camera mode of shooting.
“We devised a four-film camera system so that the cameras wouldn’t be shooting into each other,” he explained. This, alongside the same reloading technique from the previous episode, allowed the shots to cover every element of the scene – from the eulogies to the emotions of the siblings.
“From the moment the casket is brought into the church right through its procession through all the eulogies, we ran that all as one big chunk,” he added, “That was an attempt to give the cast as much emotional flow as possible, which in my opinion they always benefit from.” The cast certainly did benefit from that emotional flow, as Mylod’s filmmaking created another of the season’s most affecting scenes.
The crew behind Succession demonstrated a mastery of their craft, alongside a willingness to think outside of the box when it served the story. Always adapting to the needs of the script and the actors, the show serves as the pinnacle of the golden age and a blueprint for television mastery.
