All About the Murdoch Family, Who Inspired ‘Succession’
Netflix’s four-part documentary about Rupert Murdoch’s empire draws explicit parallels with the HBO drama succession and delivers a thorough, often bleak catalogue of nepotism, scandal and political maneuvering. The film intercuts family power plays with a broader history of the business that built Murdoch’s global influence.
How Succession Frames the Documentary’s Opening
The documentary opens with a quip that links the Murdoch story to the hit television series Succession, using that comparison as a framing device for much of the film. It matches the eldest Murdoch siblings to their fictional counterparts: Prudence as the independent elder, Lachlan as the dutiful favourite, James as the problem child and Elisabeth as the brilliant but overlooked daughter. Two younger daughters from a later marriage are explicitly not part of that succession contest.
Family Power Struggles and Project Family Harmony
A recurring through-line is a secret plan by Rupert and Lachlan to alter a family trust, a move that would nullify the siblings’ equal voting rights after Rupert’s death and hand control to Lachlan. The film labels that effort Project Family Harmony and presents it as a bid to keep the business operating in conservative political interests and to prevent the more liberal James from shifting the empire leftward. The documentary features archival material and analysis from longtime Murdoch-profile writers, but it proceeds without direct participation from the family.
Scandals, Anecdotes and the Documentary’s Tone
More than a soap-opera portrait of infighting, the film spends substantial time on Murdoch’s rise and the practices that made his outlets influential. It covers the populist, right-leaning reinventions of flagship tabloids and newspapers, an endorsement of Ronald Reagan that the film ties to deregulation enabling the launch of a major network, and a later political U-turn when one prominent politician, whom Murdoch had once called a “fucking idiot, ” began to consolidate power.
Alumni from impacted newsrooms recount phone-hacking and sexual-harassment scandals, and the documentary includes striking anecdotes that humanize and unsettle: a senior editor tossing articles across an office while shouting, recollections of Murdoch cheating at family Monopoly, his early habit of noting what “dolly birds” read on the tube, and a son’s sense that a distant father was becoming deaf. A startling allegation that Murdoch’s second wife killed a woman with her car is presented in the film but is described as having no clear trace.
There is no contribution from the family itself, but the directors draw on archival footage, interviews with critics and journalists, and a brief cameo from an actor who calls Rupert “a proper danger to liberal democracies. ” That mixture leaves the documentary feeling exhaustive in its documentation yet at times wearying in tone: the siblings’ manoeuvrings can seem secondary to the larger portrait of a man and an institution that shaped politics and media.
The four-part series ultimately reads as a historical inventory as much as a family drama. While echoes of Succession sharpen the film’s dramatic frame, the work is driven by a broader inquiry into how power, scandal and succession planning combined to shape a media empire and its political reach.
