Jesse Armstrong: Writing America from the Outside

This event took place on 18 April 2024. The information below is correct as of the publication date.
Jesse Armstrong was a writer on Veep and In the Loop, and creator and show-runner of HBO’s Succession, one of the most critically acclaimed television shows of the twenty-first century. For this one-off lecture he reflects on what it means to write about US politics, media and culture from the outside, and asks what is possible and what is out of bounds? Discover how far an American Studies background informs his work, and how he approaches writing comedy and drama in media-saturated world - that sometimes feels far beyond satire itself.
Presented by the Eccles Institute for the Americas.
Jesse Armstrong is the creator and showrunner of HBO’s Succession. He was previously co-creator and co-writer with Sam Bain of Peep Show and Fresh Meat and has worked on The Thick of It, Veep, and Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror as well as the films, In The Loop and Four Lions. In 2016 Jonathan Cape published his first novel, Love Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals. Jesse was born and educated in Oswestry, Shropshire, and attended Manchester University where he studied American Studies as an undergraduate and American History for his MA.

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Banging on about cultural appropriation. I'm glad a certain Bard wrote Shylock despite never being a Jew, and that he wrote Merchant of Venice despite never setting foot there. How sad and dull the world would be if we told writers like that, "Stick to Stratford Upon Avon"