‘Succession’ Episode 7 Directors Did Not Know About Shiv’s Pregnancy While Shooting Key Scene
A photo from the production of episode 407 of “Succession”. Photo: David M. Russell/HBO ©2022 HBO. All Rights Reserved.
To say that the fourth season of Succession has been outstanding might be the understatement of the year. Jesse Armstrong and his entire team continue to deliver probably the best series on television right now, and with each passing week, we get another hall-of-famer episode.
The series is very reminiscent of Game of Thrones in some aspects, putting aside the medieval fantasy genre and replacing it with modern-day politics, and one of those is the veil of secrecy that surrounds every episode. It was revealed in the fourth episode of the season that Sarah Snook’s Shiv is pregnant, though it hasn’t really been brought up again since then. Now, it turns out, that even the directors of episode 7 didn’t know about it, though for a very good reason.
WARNING: spoilers ahead for Succession episode 7, “Tailgate Party”
Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini had a chat with Vanity Fair about the episode, and they revealed that the fact that Shiv was pregnant was even privy to them when they were shooting the argument on the balcony between Shiv and Tom (Matthew Macfadyen), where the latter knifed her wife with the most hurtful words she could hear at that moment: “I think you are incapable of love, and I think you are maybe not a good person to have children.”
A photo from the production of episode 407 of “Succession”. Photo: David M. Russell/HBO ©2022 HBO. All Rights Reserved.
But why exactly did they not know that? Did Jesse Armstrong purposefully keep that plot point from them so that they could shoot the scene from an unbiased perspective? The answer is actually even simpler than that. Sarah Snook is pregnant in real life, and the showrunners decided to add that to her character later on; when the balcony scene for episode 7 was shot, the opening scene from episode 4 had not even been written, as Berman explained:
“[The scene from the fourth episode] where she is on the call with the doctor and it’s revealed to the audience that she’s pregnant was not written. We knew that Sarah was pregnant. But we didn’t know that Shiv was going to be pregnant. We didn’t have that specific piece of information when we shot it.”
Apparently, Armstrong decided to write the Snook’s pregnancy into the series later on, and when they did, he told Berman and Pulcini, but they still didn’t know when they would let the audience know. It might go down as one of those fortunate last-minute plot threads, that not only makes complete sense for the character and reframes the entire narrative until this point, but that also adds so much more weight to everything that is coming later this season. But these changes are not entirely unheard of for Succession and the way the entire operation works, as Alexander Skarsgård told Vanity Fair:
“There’s an incredible fluidity to the show. There are a lot changes from day one to day 97—Jesse and the other writers are very nimble. If they see something on the day that they respond to and find interesting, they might lean into that more…. There would often be quite significant script changes late because they would constantly tweak stuff—get excited about something and then explore that storyline a bit deeper.”
A photo from the production of episode 407 of “Succession”. Photo: David M. Russell/HBO ©2022 HBO. All Rights Reserved.
The stakes are being risen in practically every scene, and while there are all of these on-the-spot changes being made, the writing is so good they are able to keep the façade that this has been planned to excruciating detail. That balcony scene will be played and replayed during the Emmy FYC campaign and certainly could be enough to give both Snook and Macfadyen a statue.
New episodes of Succession are coming out every Sunday at 6pm PT on HBO.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
