It is widely accepted that Succession, HBO’s splenetic family saga, was inspired by the Murdoch dynasty. How deliciously meta, then, that the clan itself would return the favour. In 2023, Elisabeth Murdoch’s representative Mark Devereux watched Logan Roy die on screen, witnessed the chaos that followed among the fictional heirs, and panicked. The memo he wrote to prevent the family from replicating the fictional implosion caused a real one instead, leading to a court battle and a $3.3bn settlement to the siblings who missed out when Lachlan Murdoch was handed control of Fox and News Corp by his father. Jesse Armstrong, the genius behind the show, couldn’t have written it better.
Directed by the acclaimed Liz Garbus – whose credits include Harry & Meghan – Netflix’s new four-part documentary Dynasty: The Murdochs follows the story from Rupert’s earliest empire-building to that final reckoning. And as if to really ram the parallels home, tinkling through it all is Succession’s own dissonant, dizzying theme tune, with its jangling piano and stabbing strings, a persistent motif in a film that is slickly produced and gleefully told.
Central to the sit-up-and-watch potency of Dynasty is the extraordinary number of people who spent decades either working for the Murdochs or writing about them (the family declined to be interviewed). Thousands of pages of documents, emails and text messages never before seen on TV paint a portrait of a ruthless patriarch – 95 this Wednesday – who raised his four eldest children less as a family than as gladiators, pitting them against each other for his affection and his empire.
From across three continents, Garbus assembles a formidable bench: The New York Times’s Jim Rutenberg and Jonathan Mahler, the definitive chroniclers of the Nevada trust battle; The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins, who secured rare access to James Murdoch; and a slew of Fleet Street and Australian veterans. There is even a cameo from Hugh Grant, who was followed around Los Angeles by a News of the World reporter, Paul McMullan, during the paper’s dark arts heyday after the actor had been arrested for being caught with sex worker Divine Brown in 1995. “What did Murdoch want us to do? Find the girl, give her $250,000 to tell us all about what Hugh Grant asked you to do in his car,” recalls McMullan. “Life at that time was extremely difficult,” remembers the actor.
Up until now, the most complete telling had been the BBC’s three-part series The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty from 2020. Meticulously researched though it was, it arrived too early, its drama feeling strangely remote, belonging to a time when Rupert’s empire, for all its scandals, remained intact. Garbus’s account has what that lacked: resolution.
What she does particularly well is to let the sleaze breathe, the salaciousness running through Murdoch’s tabloid operation given full rein. The phone-hacking passages are chilling as former reporters recall their methods with palpable relish. “One day I turned up with those stolen photographs,” says McMullan, naming Naomi Campbell and Carla Bruni among his topless subjects. The then editor, Piers Morgan, was thrilled, he claims. “On the basis of that, I got my staff job for stealing, basically.”
Woven into the series, too, is the commercial pressure that made the succession so urgent. By 2017, the streaming wars had redrawn the map entirely. “Fox did not have the heft to go up against Netflix, Amazon, Apple,” says reporter Matthew Belloni – and the Disney sale that followed, opening a schism in the family that would never close, was Rupert’s tacit admission that the world had moved faster than he had.
Just as Succession overflowed with sardonic wit, playing out like a Jacobean tragedy, so too does Dynasty, the series unfurling to its pyrrhic climax. “Rupert said his dream was to build a family business,” says journalist Gabriel Sherman. “What he built was a business that destroyed his family.”
