'Succession' Ends Incredible Emmys Run with One Last Award for Best Drama Series (original) (raw)
Succession ended its run with a win for outstanding drama series at the 2023 Emmy Awards.
Andor, Better Call Saul, The Crown, House of the Dragon, The Last of Us, The White Lotus, and Yellowjackets were also up for the coveted prize.
“Thank you very much indeed,” series creator Jesse Armstrong shared while accepting the award. “We want to thank HBO. This wasn't necessarily an easy show to commission right at the very beginning. So thank you to Casey Bloys who I first pitched it to, to Francesca Orsi and Nora Skinner who have seen it through and to Richard Plepler who was there at the beginning.”
"Succession". HBO
He then gave a shout-out to several members of the cast and crew, saying, “And we want to say a couple of hellos. Hello to Jeremy Strong who's making a movie and hello to [co-executive producer and writer] Lucy Prebble who has made a baby and we send out love to both of them.”
“I just want to say thank you to Brian Cox. The show revolved around whether he was in it or not,” he added. "This is a show about family but it's also about when partisan politics, partisan news coverage gets intertwined with divisive right-wing politics and after four seasons of satire, as I understand it, that's a problem we have now fixed.”
He concluded: "So we can now depart the stage. Listen, we are so honored. We've loved making the show. Thank you very much indeed.”
The final season of Succession saw the death of Logan Roy (Brian Cox) leaving the fate of the Roy family and the ownership of their company Waystar Royco in limbo. The series concluded with Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) becoming the company’s new CEO.
“The idea of Tom being the eventual successor, that had been something that I thought was the right ending for quite a while now,” series creator Jesse Armstrong toldHuffPostfollowing the series finale in May.
“Even though he’s not exactly the most powerful monarch you’ll ever meet — his power comes from Matsson [Alexander Skarsgård]. Those figures that drift upwards and make themselves amenable to powerful people are around,” he added.
In addition to Cox and Macfadyen, stars Jeremy Strong, Alan Ruck, Sarah Snook, Kieran Culkin, Nicholas Braun, J. Smith-Cameron, Peter Friedman, David Rasche, Fisher Stevens, Hiam Abbass, Justine Lupe, Scott Nicholson, Zoë Winters and Jeannie Berlin.
Succession dominated the 2023 Emmys Awards nominations with a whopping 27 nods.
Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgard) and Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) in "Andor". Disney+
Andor is a direct prequel to the 2016 standalone film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which itself was a prequel to the original 1977 film Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope.
The Disney+ series follows Diego Luna's Cassian Andor, a thief who is recruited to become a Rebel spy. Season 1 was a tense espionage thriller that followed Andor through a high-stakes heist and a prison break.
Luna, 44, previously said Andor's second season will be its last — and he's happy about it.
"It is just a two-season show, which is really important for my mental health," the actor told Variety. "But knowing this is the end, I want to enjoy it and get the best out of this experience."
Bob Odenkirk in "Better Call Saul". Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television
Better Call Saul concluded its six-season run in August 2022. The Breaking Bad spinoff saw Bob Odenkirk star as criminal–turned–lawyer Saul Goodman before the events of the original series took place.
"Everybody's been asking me how I feel about saying goodbye to Saul Goodman and Better Call Saul, and I'm not good at answering the question," the 61-year-old actor shared following the show’s series finale, "because it's frankly hard for me to look at that experience, and even at that character, too closely. It's too many moving parts, and they fit together too beautifully, and it's a mystery to me how it even happened."
In addition to praising Saul's co-creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, Odenkirk shared his appreciation for fans' support over the years.
"Thanks for giving us a chance. We came out of maybe a lot of people's most favorite show ever, and we could have been hated for simply trying to do a show," he said. "But we weren't. We were given a chance, and hopefully we made the most of it. Thank you for staying with us."
The show earned numerous accolades, including more than 40 Emmy Award nominations, over the course of its run.
Des Willie/Netflix
The final season of The Crown was released in two parts. The first focused on Princess Diana’s (Elizabeth Debicki) final days before her fatal car crash in August 1997 while the second part chronicled King Charles (Dominic West as the then-Prince Charles) and Camilla's (Olivia Williams) progression in their relationship, as well as the love story between Prince William (Ed McVey) and Kate Middleton (Meg Bellamy).
Debicki told PEOPLE that the weight of playing Diana for the major streaming series was not lost on her, sharing,“I did a lot of research for this role. I probably spent about a year doing research and that just filled in all these pieces and made me have such deep, deep respect and love for this person who I didn't know so much about.”
She continued, “The battle that she went through in terms of media, public perception. I didn't know things about the divorce and how difficult all of that was for everybody in the family.”
Debicki was also nominated for outstanding supporting actress in a drama series for The Crown at this year’s Emmys. The Crown received 69 Emmy nominations over its six-season run.
Matt Smith and Emma D'Arcy in "House of the Dragon".
Ollie Upton / HBO
House of the Dragon — based on author George R.R. Martin's Fire & Blood saga — portrays the events leading up to the beginning of the decline of House Targaryen.
Matt Smith, Olivia Cooke, Emma D'Arcy, Eve Best, Steve Toussaint, Fabien Frankel, Ewan Mitchell, Tom Glynn-Carney, Sonoya Mizuno and Rhys Ifans starred in the Game of Thrones prequel series’ first season.
"Season 1 was setting the table for a very bloody feast to come," the show's co-creator Ryan Condal told Entertainment Weekly. "The reason that I wanted to really spend our time doing this is because I wanted everybody to understand who all of these characters were and the long history they had behind them — behind their fathers and their grandfathers — that led us to this point where they end up fighting a civil war against each other."
The hit HBO series scored eight Emmy nominations for its first season. The show is expected to return for a sophomore run this summer.
Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey in "The Last of Us".
Liane Hentscher/HBO
The Last of Us — which stars Game of Thrones alums Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey — followed Pascal's Joel reluctantly partner with teen Ellie (Ramsey) to survive a post-apocalyptic world beset by zombie-like creature and relentless human survivors.
The series takes place decades after civilization has been destroyed and is based on a 2013 video game. Nick Offerman, Murray Bartlett, Gabriel Luna, Merle Dandridge, Jeffrey Pierce, Anna Torv and Storm Reid also had roles in season 1, with Offerman and Reid winning guest actor and guest actress Emmys on Jan. 6 for their work.
Pascal opened up about his experience filming the series in Alberta, Canada, telling Business Insider, “It was incredibly challenging, but it was more fun than anything else because of how delicious the scripts are, the characters, the creators, the team, putting it all together, the locations, the cultural environment of being in Canada and having a Canadian crew and all of these elements that fell into line with one another.”
"It didn't mean that it wasn't hard work, and that it wasn't a very specific kind of physical labor for everyone," he continued. "That's kind of what happened. A very large family going through a very contained experience, and it was really wonderful for everybody.”
The second season of The Last of Us will premiere on HBO in 2025, with production slated to start next month.
Haley Lu Richardson and Jennifer Coolidge in "The White Lotus".
HBO
The second season of The White Lotus chronicled the comings and goings of vacationers and staff at the Italian branch of the infamous hotel chain.
Jennifer Coolidge and Jon Gries returned for season 2, and new cast members included Sabrina Impacciatore, Michael Imperioli, Haley Lu Richardson, Theo James, Aubrey Plaza and Meghann Fahy.
"It's more juicy, it feels like the stakes are higher and there's more intense drama and plot twists than the first season," Plaza, who portrayed lawyer Harper Spiller, told Entertainment Weekly. "It's more heightened in the way that it made sense for the stories that happened on this volcanic island.”
“Of course the stories and the characters are more volcanic because that was the energy in Sicily. Italy has this kind of machismo culture that we're thrust into and when you have a bunch of Americans going to Europe, there's always that discourse with the puritanical American style versus the Italians who just seem to be much more open and sexual, to be blunt," she added.
The White Lotus has received 43 Emmy nominations in its two-season run. A premiere date for season 3 has not been announced.
Christina Ricci as Misty, Juliette Lewis as Natalie, Tawny Cypress as Taissa and Melanie Lynskey as Shauna in "Yellowjackets". Kailey Schwerman/SHOWTIME
Yellowjackets stars Melanie Lynskey, Christina Ricci, Juliette Lewis and Tawny Cypress as four women bonded by a 1996 plane crash that stranded their eponymous high school soccer team in the brutal Canada wilderness for 19 months.
As the show explores how they survived in the wild with performances by young actors Ella Purnell, Sophie Nélisse, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Sophie Thatcher, Samantha Hanratty, Courtney Eaton and Liv Hewson, their adult counterparts are plagued by an anonymous stalker who blackmails them with the mysterious truth of what went down in the woods.
Lynskey, who plays Shauna Shipman on the series, celebrated her younger Yellowjackets costars after they wrapped their part for season 2 of the hit Showtime drama.
She thanked the cast and crew for their "hard work" and "brilliance" and "the love I feel from all of you.”
"Sorry to be sappy but the 90s cast of Yellowjackets wrapped yesterday and we all sat and watched episode 201 together..." she wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter) at the time. "And other than my siblings, I have never felt this level of pride and respect and adoration for a group of people. I can't believe their talent and their hearts.”
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