On the first day of June 2024, Rupert Murdoch, aged ninety-three, married Elena Zhukova, a retired Russian molecular biologist, at his vineyard estate in the hills above Los Angeles. It was his fifth wedding. The guest list was private. The implications were not. Within the tabloid ecosystem and the financial press alike, the marriage prompted a now-familiar reflex: comparison to Succession, HBO’s four-season dissection of a fictional media dynasty modelled, with varying degrees of subtlety, on the Murdoch family itself. But the reflex has become too easy, and the comparison too neat. The truth is that the relationship between Jesse Armstrong’s drama and the real-world saga it echoes has shifted, inverted, and grown considerably more complicated since the series concluded in May 2023. To understand why Succession endures as a cultural reference point, one must look beyond the surface parallels and into the machinery of legacy, power, and the particular cruelty of family trusts.
The Wedding That Should Have Been a Punchline
When Murdoch and Zhukova’s engagement was announced in March 2024, the internet did what the internet does: it reached for the HBO catalogue. Logan Roy marrying a woman younger than three of his children felt like a plotline Jesse Armstrong had rejected for being too on-the-nose. But the wedding itself was a quiet affair, a vineyard ceremony stripped of the spectacle that typically accompanies Murdoch’s public manoeuvres. The BBC reported that the couple had been introduced by Wendi Deng, Murdoch’s third wife, and that Zhukova’s daughter, Dasha, had previously been married to the oligarch Roman Abramovich. The connections were layered, almost novelistically so: media power, Russian capital, old-money social networks, and the peculiar gravitational field that surrounds a man who has shaped the political information diet of three continents.
Yet the wedding was, in a strategic sense, secondary to the legal war being fought simultaneously in a Nevada probate court. In December 2023, Murdoch had filed to alter the terms of the Murdoch Family Trust, established in 1999 following his divorce from Anna Torv. The trust gave each of his four eldest children – Prudence, Elisabeth, Lachlan, and James – equal voting rights over News Corp and Fox Corporation. Murdoch sought to grant Lachlan sole control, ostensibly to protect the editorial direction of Fox News from the more liberal instincts of James, Elisabeth, and Prudence. The probate commissioner, Edmund Gorman Jr., ruled against Murdoch in December 2024, finding that his attempt to amend the “irrevocable” trust was not made in good faith. In September 2025, the family reached a settlement that allowed Lachlan to retain operational control while restructuring the trust’s financial distribution. It was, in every meaningful sense, a succession crisis – and it played out not in a writers’ room but in a sealed courtroom under Nevada’s strict confidentiality laws.
Armstrong’s Paradox: Satirist as Prophet
Jesse Armstrong has spoken frequently about the anxiety of finishing Succession at the peak of its powers. On Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in January 2026, he described the impostor syndrome that has dogged him throughout his career: “All the good writers I know that I’ve ever met are riddled with self-doubt and lack of certainty about whether what they’ve just done is good.” The admission was disarmingly candid for a writer who had just won his fourteenth Emmy. But it also illuminated something essential about the show’s relationship to reality. Armstrong never claimed to be predicting the future. He was, as he told The Observer in May 2025, simply interested in power: “Succession was a show about media power, really, and this is a show about tech power,” he said, referring to his debut feature film Mountainhead, a satire of Silicon Valley oligarchs. The distinction matters. Armstrong’s genius was never prescience. It was diagnosis – the ability to identify the emotional grammar of dynastic conflict with such precision that the real-world parallels became unavoidable.
The Harvard Business Review has documented that roughly thirty per cent of family businesses survive into the second generation. About twelve per cent make it to the third. The numbers worsen from there. What Succession dramatised was not merely the dysfunction of the Roy family but the structural impossibility of transmitting power through blood in a way that preserves both institutional coherence and personal dignity. The Roys were not destroyed by their flaws. They were destroyed by the system their father built, which required their ambition to function and then punished them for exercising it.
The Real Roys and the Fictional Roys: Where the Parallel Breaks Down
The temptation to map the Murdochs onto the Roys has been a constant since the show’s debut in 2018. Lachlan as Kendall, James as Roman, Elisabeth as Shiv – the correspondences were irresistible, and the show’s early marketing leaned into them. But the real succession has since revealed a more complex picture than any screenwriter might have devised. James Murdoch, the “rebellious” son, resigned from the family firm in 2020 over editorial differences – specifically, his growing discomfort with Fox News’s climate scepticism and its role in amplifying election fraud narratives. He has since invested in independent media and climate-focused ventures, a trajectory that has no analogue among the Roy siblings, all of whom remain trapped in the gravitational pull of their father’s empire even after his death.
The settlement of September 2025 further complicated the analogy. As The Guardian reported, the deal allowed Lachlan to maintain operational control while providing financial settlements to his siblings – a resolution that, unlike Succession‘s finale, did not require anyone to be destroyed. The empire survived. The family, for now, remains intact. It is a结局 that Armstrong’s script would likely have rejected as insufficiently dramatic, yet it is precisely the kind of pragmatic, unsatisfying resolution that characterises real dynastic wealth management.
Meanwhile, Murdoch himself has continued to exert influence well beyond what his formal titles suggest. In February 2025, The Hollywood Reporter documented his presence in the Oval Office alongside Donald Trump, a reminder that his power was never merely corporate. It was political, cultural, and, in the deepest sense, architectural: he built the infrastructure through which a significant portion of the English-speaking world receives its news. That infrastructure – Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The Sun, The Times – now operates under Lachlan’s stewardship, but the editorial direction remains recognisably Rupert’s.
Why the Show Still Matters
Succession won nineteen Emmys across four seasons, including the outstanding drama award for each of its four runs. Its finale, “With Open Eyes,” drew 2.9 million same-day viewers, a number that understates its cultural penetration by an order of magnitude. The show’s language – “you can’t make a Tomlette without breaking some Greggs,” “what is this, a fucking family restaurant?” – has entered the vocabulary of anyone who discusses wealth, power, or family with any frequency. But its significance extends beyond catchphrases.
The series arrived in 2018 at a moment when the visibility of extreme wealth had finally outpaced the mythology built to justify it. The post-2008 financial crisis, the Panama Papers, the increasing audacity of billionaire-class politics – these created an audience primed for a drama that treated the ultra-wealthy not as aspirational figures but as case studies in arrested development. Succession delivered that drama with a precision that owed as much to Chekhov and King Lear as to contemporary financial journalism. The show’s emotional register – its insistence that power does not ennoble but deforms – was, and remains, its most radical proposition.
As Social Life Magazine observed in a March 2026 retrospective, the show’s legacy is not a lesson about what not to do. It is “a very precise and very expensive portrait of what we are already doing.” The asset survives. The people do not. That is the thesis. It applies to the Roys. It applies, with uncomfortable frequency, beyond them.
The Murdochs After the Show
The Murdoch family’s post-Succession trajectory has only reinforced the show’s relevance. Lachlan’s consolidation of power has been widely covered as the fulfilment of his father’s wishes, but the terms of the settlement – and the financial concessions made to James, Elisabeth, and Prudence – suggest a more nuanced reality. The New York Times reported in September 2025 that the deal effectively restructured the family’s relationship to the trust, transforming it from a mechanism of control into a mechanism of distribution. It was a resolution that prioritised the institution over the individuals, which is, of course, exactly what Succession always argued was the inevitable outcome.
Jesse Armstrong, for his part, has moved on to Mountainhead, his tech-bro satire debuting on Sky Atlantic, while remaining characteristically guarded about his next long-form project. “Being back in New York,” he told The Observer, “it feels like it was a different human being who did Succession.” He added, with a cautionary clause, that he might have “one more go” at a series of that scale, “but certainly not for a while.” The statement was modest, but it carried an undertone of exhaustion that anyone who watched the show’s final season will recognise. To depict power this precisely is to be consumed by it, even at a remove.
The real succession, meanwhile, continues. Lachlan Murdoch now controls an empire that spans Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The Sun, The Times, HarperCollins, and dozens of broadcast and publishing assets across the English-speaking world. His editorial instincts have been broadly consistent with his father’s, though the specific contours of his influence remain to be fully mapped. What is clear is that the question Succession posed – what happens when the patriarch departs and the institution must survive without him – has been answered, at least provisionally, not by fiction but by a Nevada probate court, a family settlement, and a vineyard wedding on a Saturday in June.
The game, as Logan Roy might have observed, never truly ends. It simply changes players.
