Breaking news: Succession season five has just dropped!
Oh wait, no. This latest chapter in the story of modern media’s most famous family might feel ripped from the script notes of Jesse Armstrong’s blockbuster saga, but the news that Rupert Murdoch, the nonagenarian founder of News Corp, will step down as the company’s chair is the climax of a decades-long drama. It should be no shock that the Australian-born magnate will be relinquishing some of his duties at the age of 92, but the past decades have seen so much turmoil within the Murdoch clan – including brutal consanguineal relations between his kids – that there was a feeling that this day might never arrive. Yet here it is.
“Truth is stranger than fiction,” wrote Mark Twain, “but I am measurably familiar with it.” Well, for those missing their fix on intrigue among media elites, here’s a rundown of how the Murdochs measure up to their fictional counterparts, Succession’s Roys.
James Murdoch
At the heart of the story are three siblings: James, Lachlan and Elisabeth. James – a spring chicken at 50 – is, in fact, the youngest of the trio, but has, in many ways, the most relevant experience. After studying at Harvard and dipping his toe in the waters of a hip-hop record label (think “R to the UP” rather than “L to the OG”), he’s been a company man since the 1990s. In the search for daddy’s approval, he’s the grafter.
He ate a considerable amount of public relations faeces for his father in 2011, as the phone hacking scandal broke. Since then, he’s been CEO of News Corp Europe and Asia, CEO of Sky, and CEO of 21st Century Fox, a CV that would be remarkable if he had any other surname. But in 2020 he resigned from the board of News Corp, citing “disagreements” over the content being aired on Fox News (the channel was embroiled in a legal dispute over its coverage of Donald Trump’s contest to the 2020 presidential election result).
Kieran Culkin as Roman, alongside James Murdoch and Jeremy Strong as Kendall— (Sky, Getty)
Because he is the youngest son, James often faces comparison to Roman Roy, played by Kieran Culkin. Certainly, there is a sense that, like Roman, he lives in the shadow of his elder siblings, and has never been in the presumed line of succession. But in many ways, his more obvious analogue is Kendall: he is a striver, who has put in the hours with the family roadshow, but who wants, desperately, to be seen as a progressive. In a 2021 New Yorker profile, Jeremy Strong (who portrays Kendall) said that he adopted James’s habit of tying the laces on his shoes very tightly in order to channel something of the man’s “inner tensile strength” (whatever that means).
Lachlan Murdoch
The other boy in the equation is Lachlan, who has today been named as daddy’s favourite son. “I’m the eldest boy!” yelled Kendall, in a quote that has become a deliciously applicable meme. “You’re not!” snorted Shiv in response. But Lachlan is the eldest boy, if not the eldest child. And he has been pre-ordained as Rupert’s successor for many years (Maggie Haberman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter relayed that Murdoch had told President Trump that “it’s going to be Lachlan”). If there were a line under his name, it would be less ambiguous. Underlined, not crossed out.
Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch— (Getty)
All the same, temperamentally Lachlan is much more like Roman. Where James has little round spectacles, floppy hair and a bit of stubble (he looks like the sort of unthreatening dad you’d find at a farmer’s market in Chiswick), Lachlan is jockish. Sort of buff – with perpetually one too many buttons undone on his shirt – he is perfectly at home in the macho world of C-level executives. Following a few years in familial Siberia – he left in 2011 to start a private investment company – he returned to News Corp in 2014 and has taken to the task like a right-wing duck to the right-wing water.
Just as Roman cynically courted a charismatic populist, so too did Lachlan jump on the Trump train with alarming alacrity. Michael Wolff, who has a new book on Papa Murdoch coming out shortly, reports that the patriarch often wished Trump dead (not unlike the way that Logan demeaned the incumbent president as “The Raisin”). But even while the chief was turning his nose up at the Maga messiah, his son was turning Fox News into the propaganda wing of the Trump movement, to great ratings success (even if it would end in an eye-watering $787.5m settlement for defamatory claims about voter fraud).
Elisabeth Murdoch
Which all brings us to Elisabeth, Rupert’s only daughter and – you guessed it – the inspiration for Shiv (Sarah Snook). Despite having a few years on her brothers (she was the first child from Rupert’s marriage to Scottish-born novelist Anna Maria Torv), she has never been considered a serious contender as his successor, and left the business in the early Noughties. The TV production company she founded, Shine, was responsible for shows like MasterChef and The Biggest Loser. In 2011, Elisabeth managed her greatest achievement since forsaking the privileges of her gilded name and striking out alone when Shine was acquired for a whopping £153m by – let’s see – a certain “News Corp”. Hmm.
Elisabeth Murdoch and Sarah Snook’s Shiv— (Getty, Sky)
All the same, with her interest predominantly in cultural pursuits rather than whipping the rust belt into a salivating frenzy, the comparisons with Shiv are unavoidable. In 2001, she married Brit Matthew Freud, son of Liberal MP Clement Freud and grandson of Sigmund. Though they’re now divorced, she still lives a quiet life in a £40m home in north London. Like Shiv, she cares what people think of her and her politics. She held a 2008 fundraiser for Barack Obama and was described as “politically liberal where [her father] is conservative”, by New York Magazine.
Prudence Murdoch
And then there’s Prudence, Rupert’s eldest child from his first marriage to Patricia Booker. She’s not running for president, not fretting about maintaining her “per cent”. That said, there are similarities with Connor, played by Alan Ruck. She is often elided from profiles of the Murdoch dynasty and was described by Wolff as “the only one of his children not directly competing for his business affections”. Contentment, it seems, comes in a lot of shapes and sizes – and a $2.5bn net worth will help.
Prudence Murdoch and Alan Ruck’s Connor— (Shutterstock, Sky)
With the news that Loga– sorry, Rupert, will be stepping back, the succession saga that inspired one of the great TV shows of the modern era seems, finally, to be resolved. There is no enigmatic Scandinavian entrepreneur riding in (deus ex machina or, more aptly, deus ex ketamina) nor a Tom Wambsgans to complete his ascent from Saint Paul to Wall Street.
Whether you read Lachlan as the prototype for Kendall or Roman, the reality of the choice is simple: continuity. The wily old fox has proven that where fiction opts for breaking things up, refreshing the cycle, truth keeps them intact. For the Murdoch children there will be no ambivalent, dead-eyed staring into the river from a bench in Battery Park. Just more money and more power.
