It has long been suspected that the Roy family in HBO’s Succession is loosely based on the Murdoch family. But you may be surprised how many Succession and the show’s Murdoch family similarities to the real-life media moguls who own Fox News.

Warning: Spoilers follow for Season 4 of Succession.

To be clear, Succession Creator Jesse Armstrong said he didn’t base the show solely on the Murdochs, insisting they’re just one of many media families he studied while writing. .

“I wrote the pilot solo, so there was a lot of my own research and life experience in there,” Armstrong said. told HBO. “Then there is the writing room, which everyone informs with their stories and backgrounds. We thought of famous media families like the Hearsts, in today’s Redstone, John Malone, Robert Fitz of Comcast, Murdoch, and Robert and Rebekah Mercer, who founded Breitbart. Lots of real life bumps. We collected a myriad of these types of relationships that we knew about. And then, like all creative people, you attack a surprising range of relationships that you have experienced in your own life. So many, many places.

Nevertheless, similarities persist between Murdochs’ News Corporation and Roy’s Waystar Royco, as well as between Waystar’s right-wing news network ATN and News Corp’s right-wing news network Fox News.

Murdoch family succession and similarities

A new Vanity Fair the cover story says that Lachlan Murdoch pointed the finger at his younger brother, James Murdoch, with the former accusing the latter of giving script ideas about their family to the Succession writers. The Lachlan camp denied saying that, of course. Filmmaker contacted News Corp. and James Murdoch’s company Lupa Systems for comment, but none responded.

Click on the pages below and I’ll explain the similarities between the top four Succession characters and their potential Murdoch counterparts, plus a slew of other similarities between the show and real life. But let’s be clear: These are all just connections anyone reading the news could make between the Murdochs and the Roys. No direct comparison between members of the Murdoch family has been confirmed by either Succession or the Murdochs themselves.

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