The Armando Iannucci coaching tree

How a British comedy series inspired a pair of critical darlings.

Jack Lowden (Slow Horses), Peter Capaldi (The Thick of It), and Sarah Snook (Succession)

In professional sports, coaching trees are used to gauge the overall impact and influence that any given head coach has on their assistants. Think of it as a family tree of sorts – if Bill Belichick is at the top, below him would be someone like Josh McDaniels, an assistant coach with the Patriots who went on to become a head coach in his own right. It’s a good way to convey how so many prominent figures in sports find their tutelage among, maybe not so surprisingly, a select handful of generational minds.

But what if we took that same concept and transferred it to storytelling? What coaching trees exist in the writer’s room, and what patterns can be traced across those collective bodies of work? I’d argue the most notable example comes from David Chase and his groundbreaking American epic The Sopranos. Chase may have been the show’s gale force, but he surrounded himself with an equal caliber of creatives including eventual Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, Boardwalk Empire creator Terence Winter, and Blue Bloods (not a fan, but still) creators Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess. Dig a generation deeper and you find Mad Men writer Jonathan Igla, who recently made the Disney+ series Hawkeye.

It's not just that these writers went on to make their own television shows after working with David Chase. It’s that most of them, particularly Matthew Weiner and Terence Winter, used the very thematic foundation of The Sopranos as a jumping-off point to examine distinct yet intertwined periods of American history. It's undeniable that The Sopranos influenced the entire television landscape moving forward, but in a strictly literal sense, we never would’ve gotten Mad Men or Boardwalk Empire had the creators not first honed their craft with David Chase.

Chase may have the most eye-popping coaching tree among modern day TV creatives, but a more fascinating example resides in the 'School of Armando Iannucci.’ Characterized by a restless camera style, biting satire, and rapid-fire insults that could be deemed a sort of “poetic profanity,” Iannucci’s The Thick of It – a show about a group of incompetent British government workers – debuted in 2005 and is one of the sharpest comedies of the 21st century. It’s essentially the British Veep because… well, it is. Iannucci created both shows and a good chunk of the writer’s room carried over to the American version.

Among the writers who didn’t carry over was Jesse Armstrong, the man responsible for one of the most acclaimed shows of the last decade in Succession. Chronicling the lives of the billionaire owners of a global media conglomerate, Succession is characterized by a camera that often takes on a life of its own in order to keep up with the rapid-fire acidity of its writing. Wait a minute… Holy cow! Influence!

Succession is, in many ways, a spiritual ‘successor’ (sorry) to The Thick of It, and it’s fun to compare the two after learning of the connection. They have similar visual and writing styles, and both center on characters who are largely unqualified for the rather serious tasks at hand. But while The Thick of It focuses more on the mundanity of these arenas, Armstrong’s show is much more operatic and grandiose than its predecessor. It’s much more HBO. After all, Armstrong based the show’s central Roy family dynamic on King Lear.

It's not just the Succession–The Thick of It dynamic that makes this coaching tree so fascinating. Will Smith (not that one) was another principal writer on The Thick of It who followed Iannucci over to Veep, but he’s recently stepped into a spotlight of his own with the Emmy-winning spy thriller Slow Horses. The Apple TV+ series is a bit more visually polished, but it retains the banter and bumbling characters of the Iannucci-verse while injecting a genuine edge-of-your-seat tension.

As his protégés make their own marks on the television landscape, Iannucci himself has struggled to break back into the cultural zeitgeist ever since Veep came to an end. And while I want to give him much, much more credit than simply saying his satirical sensibility has run its course (because I don’t think that’s true), Succession and Slow Horses are successful largely because of how they expand on the Iannucci style, not replicate it. Both shows retain the biting satire of prime Iannucci, but that element serves as much more of an appetizer for the real drama as opposed to the main course itself.

His best work may be in the past, but Iannucci is still a genius, and he deserves so much credit for mentoring this group of writers that would go on to become some of the marquee creatives in the business. Even when his own content flies under the radar, his influence is sure to be on display somewhere else.

For as much as I’ve hyped up The Thick of It, I should note that the first six episodes are essentially unwatchable in hindsight. Chris Langham, the show’s original lead actor, was found guilty in 2007 of some genuinely heinous crimes and it’s impossible (at least for me) to watch those episodes without feeling uncomfortable. I would suggest skipping ahead to season three when the show underwent a soft relaunch and recentered itself around Peter Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker.

All that aside, coaching trees in any sense are fascinating, and this one especially. I’m sure there’s a ton of other examples that I’m not even aware of, so let me know what I missed!