Jesse Armstrong on Writers' Rooms: 'Leading Brave Soldiers to Certain Death'

Jesse Armstrong, creator and showrunner of HBO's Succession, has described the writers' room as "the one part of working on a television show that I have uncomplicated feelings of regret not to be doing any longer." His verdict comes in a first-person account by Guardian chief film critic Peter Bradshaw, who co-wrote and executive-produced the forthcoming Channel 4 drama-thriller Hunting Alice Bell with head writer and showrunner David Baddiel. The series airs on Channel 4 at 9pm on 11 and 12 November.

Hunting Alice Bell follows a sports centre manager in an ordinary UK town who is accused online of being the former girlfriend of a notorious serial killer — a woman relocated under a false name after serving a short jail sentence. Bradshaw calls it "a story of misogyny, online paranoia and digital mob rule."

What actually happens in The Room?

The writers' room, Bradshaw writes, dismantles the solitude traditionally associated with writing. For the series, the team convened around a boardroom table at the production offices — including Kate Verghese (HBO's Industry), Polly Buckle (Netflix's Love Rat), Stuart Cheetham (The Good Ship Murder) and David Persiva (The Teacher). They worked episode by episode, mapping plot beats and character arcs on a whiteboard in water-based marker pen — "manuscript culture," not laptops.

Showrunner Baddiel holds final say. "The room is fantastic, in terms of creative adventure and possibility," he said. "The only thing I would say is you do, in the end, have to do the actual slog of writing the bloody thing, line by line, scene by scene, as before." He described the process as "your own exhausted old writing brain" in a "hopefully still productive, non-toxic relationship" with the communal hive mind.

Armstrong was blunt about the risks. "When you get stuck, on some plot thing or the shape of a whole season, that can feel terrible; you feel that you're leading a small platoon of brave soldiers to certain death," he said. Later seasons carry their own hazard: "the queasy, uneasy feeling that you are writing fan fiction of your own work."

The showrunner, he added, must decide. "Someone might say: Shiv should do this. Someone else feels: no – that's not real. If it's important, in the end I would have to say: 'OK, I think this is the way we have to go, for now.'"

How does the UK compare with the US?

Buckle noted the pay gap. "In the US, they can pay writers tens of thousands of dollars a week to work in rooms, enough money so you can afford to turn everything else down," she said. "I've heard of rooms where people aren't guaranteed to get an episode to write. Eight people competing for four episodes. It's a case of 'dance, monkey, dance!'"

Verghese called the room "a vital US import": "In this country, I think we don't spend enough time or money on the story part of the process. Story is like emotional maths." She described five-month-long American rooms, "some quite alpha rooms," where competition can be performative — though "when the creative alchemy is good, it's such a buzz." She also gets through two packs of chewing gum a day; on one show, a character was given the same habit. "I watched it, and thought: 'Shit, is that based on me?!'"

Armstrong says the UK has not reached US scale: "I heard about a room in America that was so big people had microphones so everyone could hear and one writer deliberately crinkled their Coke can on the punchline of every joke another writer else pitched."

Bradshaw's own room, he reports, was "terrifically collaborative and positive" — though sustained by KitKats, Penguins and Tesco treats rather than the single grapes he started with.