The dynastic struggle for control of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has invited comparisons to “King Lear” and “Game of Thrones,” and played out like a real-life version of “Succession.”
But another way to picture the saga is as a “gilded version of ‘Life,’” said Sara Enright, who co-directed the final episode of “Dynasty: The Murdochs,” a four-part docuseries premiering Friday on Netflix. The board itself is “like a Frankenstein” of various games, Enright said, with elements of “Chutes and Ladders” and “Mousetrap.” The intention, she said, was to depict the “uncertainty of the path forward,” with the players “very much at the whim of things being thrown at them.”
Siblings Lachlan, James and Elisabeth fall out with their father — and back in the line of succession — in a dizzying series of reversals that director Liz Garbus and Enright, her partner on the series, depict as game pieces landing on spaces like “Work for Dad,” “Start Your Own Company” or “You’ve Been Demoted,” while passing markers of the kingdom such as the New York Post and News of the World.
Even if succession can be imagined as a board game, whoever sits atop the Murdoch dynasty holds extraordinary real-world power. Over the past half-century, Rupert Murdoch built a media, sports and entertainment juggernaut spanning three continents — one that has influenced presidents and prime ministers, injected a populist tabloid sensibility into politics and culture and helped create the conditions for Donald Trump’s rise.
From the bare-knuckle tactics of his salacious tabloids to incendiary rhetoric on cable news, Murdoch’s outlets have helped shape — and, to many critics, coarsen — public discourse for decades. The series captures moments when Murdoch’s power appeared to wane, such as when he and James were grilled in 2011 before Parliament over the News of the World phone hacking scandal that ensnared not only celebrities but a murdered schoolgirl, or when Fox News settled with Dominion Voting Systems in 2023 for $787.5 million after amplifying Trump’s false 2020 election claims.
And yet Murdoch persevered, with Fox News finishing 2025 atop the cable ratings. The patriarch’s clout was still on display this past week at his 95th birthday party in Manhattan, which drew guests across politics, business, sports and entertainment, including Jared and Ivanka Trump, Doug Burgum, Tony Blair, Paul Ryan, Barry Diller, Robert Kraft, Jerry Jones, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Hugh Jackman. President Trump sent a video message.
James, Elisabeth and Prudence — the older sister who never vied for the throne — were notably absent from the birthday bash, which is hardly surprising given that Lachlan, the sibling more aligned with Rupert politically, won the succession sweepstakes last year. Rupert and Lachlan’s attempt to change the family trust to preserve the company’s conservative bent triggered a bitter court fight in Reno, Nevada, with the three siblings ultimately settling for $1.1 billion apiece.
Garbus, an Oscar-nominated filmmaker, said her work on Netflix’s December 2022 series “Harry & Meghan” sparked conversations about covering the Murdochs, who similarly “by accident of birth or marriage” were thrust into the public eye and helped shape “the reality that the rest of us get to live in.”
While family drama propels the narrative arc of “Dynasty: The Murdochs,” and is truly riveting, the series also captures the stakes of leading Fox Corp., which boasts live news, sports and entertainment assets such as Fox Broadcasting, Fox News, Fox Business, Fox Sports and Tubi; and News Corp., the publishing and news arm that includes Wall Street Journal-parent Dow Jones, The Sun, The Times of London, The Australian and HarperCollins.
A murderer’s row of Murdoch chroniclers narrate Rupert’s successes — dominating Fleet Street, launching Fox, selling 21st Century Fox’s entertainment assets to Disney for $71.3 billion — and how the children competed for his attention throughout, from the breakfast table to the boardroom.
“We all have families, we all have siblings we fight with, we all have parents who we want to please, who we try to emulate or not,” Garbus told TheWrap. “And there can be cruelty, there can be love.”
The difference with the Murdoch family, she added, is their “squabbles affect all of us.”
“On a precipice of clarity”
Murdoch succession has been a decades-long obsession among media watchers, a number of whom provide the play-by-play throughout the series.
The New York Times’ Jim Rutenberg and Jonathan Mahler, who broke ground on the Reno case, are joined by the Atlantic’s McKay Coppins, tech journalist and podcaster Kara Swisher, NPR’s David Folkenflik, Puck’s Matt Belloni, Washington Post and Vanity Fair veteran Sarah Ellison, Media Mix’s Claire Atkinson and Lachlan Murdoch biographer Paddy Manning, among others.
When Garbus and Enright began working on the film in 2024, there wasn’t a clear resolution to the succession battle — but secret court proceedings were setting the stage for a finale. Rutenberg and Mahler reported that year how a consequential case was getting underway in a Reno probate court.
“There was a sense we were on a precipice of clarity,” Garbus said. “We didn’t know how long it would take. We didn’t know what shape it would take, but there was a sense that we were in the penultimate moments of this game.”
Neither Rupert Murdoch nor his children participated in the Netflix series, but their perspectives come through in archival footage and articles. Details of the court proceedings, revealed by the Times, illuminated rancor within the family, and evidence at trial — including text messages between family members — provided “another layer to our story,” Enright said.
Garbus said the settlement provided resolution “to explore the entire narrative arc” of Rupert Murdoch’s life, from succeeding his own father in newspapers in Australia, to expanding the business in the U.K. and US and establishing his own successor. It also put to rest long-simmering speculation that James and Elisabeth might try to take control of the empire after Rupert dies and shift its editorial line to the left.
While some people “projected a lot of ideas onto” the siblings, Garbus said the settlement showed “what they valued the most in terms of their role and their future in this company.” Whereas Lachlan, she said, can be expected to mold the business “very much in the shape and image of his father,” given his “enormous respect for him and deference to him.”
Trump and beyond
Garbus was in the New York Times newsroom in August 2017 directing “The Fourth Estate,” a Showtime series spotlighting the paper’s reporters covering Trump’s first term, when the president made his infamous “very fine people, on both sides” remarks after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that led to the death of a protester.
As Trump faced swift backlash over the comments, Garbus recalled seeing pundits at the time defending the president on Fox News. It’s also a pivotal episode in which James condemned Trump’s remarks, a public distancing from the family business, and for Garbus, “a moment in both projects that folded in on one another, where you’re looking at the same event from various perspectives of media coverage.”
The Trump-Murdoch relationship is a tumultuous one. The reality TV star would talk news and world affairs on “Fox & Friends” during the Obama years, helping raise his political profile. But Murdoch, who appears more in the mold of a Reagan Republican, was opposed early on to Trump’s populist 2016 presidential bid, only to reverse course when it was clear the GOP base — and presumably core Fox News viewers — were on board.
“These past 10 years have been so crazy-fast-moving with news,” Garbus said, and people may have forgotten how Trump “forced Fox’s hand” and “won that game.”
As for victors in the Murdoch family feud, Rutenberg said near the end of the series that “for all this talk of winning, they all lost,” adding: “They’ve got their billions, but they’ve lost their family. And that is what being a Murdoch really cost them.”
It’s hard to feel sorry for a billionaire’s heirs accumulating more money and power. But the expressionless game pieces moving around the board actually humanize the family members, portraying them as caught in a contest by birth and circumstance. And the consequences of this gilded game stretch far beyond a single family dynasty, affecting all of us.
