Succession’s Jesse Armstrong was hoping someone would talk him out of ending the show

The beginning of Succession’s final season begins tonight, and while that might be a bummer for the show’s fans, it’s equally a bummer for series creator Jesse Armstong. At the red carpet premiere for the final season, Armstrong told Variety that, even though he pitched season four as the end of Succession to his writers, he was “kind of hoping” that someone would be able to talk him out of it so they could keep the show going—adding that he loves working with everyone on the show, even though ending it now gives a “feeling of completeness and rightness to the shape of the show.”

That’s in line with the statement Armstrong made when he first announced that this would be the end of the show, when he noted that he was “genuinely open to alternative ways of going” and would’ve been willing to do a “more rangy, freewheeling kind of fun show” with “good weeks and bad weeks” if someone had made a compelling argument in favor it. But, evidently, that didn’t happen, because the show is starting its final season tonight.

Still, Armstrong said he had the last scene of the show “pretty early,” and though the writers talked about how to end things “a lot,” he says, “I never wavered from that.” The very end that you’ll see when the show ends is right from his very first draft. As for what that ending involves, Armstrong noted that he specifically admires the endings of Six Feet Under and The Sopranos and their “radically different ways of concluding” (one shows everyone die and the other does not), but for Succession he had to go with something “bespoke, obviously.” So it stands to reason that the series won’t end with a montage of all of the Roys dying, and it also won’t end with a cut to black before we see Logan Roy die.