The documentary everyone who loved Succession has been waiting for dropped on Netflix today.
Dynasty: The Murdochs is a four-part series from the production company behind Harry & Meghan and the director of countless acclaimed documentaries, and it is built around something no previous Murdoch documentary has had… Thousands of pages of private documents, emails, and text messages that have never before been seen on television.
All four episodes are available now.
Here is the true story behind what the documentary reveals, and why the ending is more shocking than anything the writers of the HBO drama invented.
Who Made Dynasty: The Murdochs And What Makes It Different?
Dynasty: The Murdochs is directed by Liz Garbus and produced by Story Syndicate, the company behind the record-breaking Harry & Meghan documentary.
The executive producers are Sara Enright, who co-directed the finale, Dan Cogan, Jon Bardin, and Mala Chapple.
Each episode runs approximately 60 minutes.
The series features interviews with some of the most respected media journalists in the world: Kara Swisher, Matthew Belloni, Jonathan Mahler, David Folkenflik, Jim Rutenberg, and Claire Atkinson, among others.
What sets it apart is the primary source material. Unlike previous Murdoch profiles built around public record and on-the-record interviews, this documentary draws on private communications, including emails and text messages between the Murdoch family members themselves, obtained as part of the legal proceedings described below.
The Empire Rupert Murdoch Built
The documentary opens with the story of how Rupert Murdoch constructed one of the most powerful and politically consequential media empires in history.
Through News Corp, founded in 1979, and Fox Corporation, founded in 2019, Murdoch expanded from an Australian newspaper inheritance into television networks, film studios, and cable news channels across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.
His outlets became defining forces in political discourse across multiple countries, Fox News in America, The Sun and The Times in Britain, and a constellation of newspapers and broadcasters that shaped elections and governments for decades.
The documentary examines how Murdoch’s political influence operated not through backroom deals alone, but through the cumulative effect of what his outlets chose to amplify and what they chose to ignore.
He has six children from three marriages: Prudence from his first wife Patricia Booker; Elisabeth, Lachlan, and James from his second wife Anna Torv; and Grace and Chloe from his third wife Wendi Deng.
The Succession Battle — Lachlan vs. James
As Murdoch’s children grew up, the question of who would inherit control of the empire became the defining drama of the family. The documentary traces how that competition took shape across decades.
Lachlan Murdoch entered the family business early but eventually stepped away, returning to Australia to run his own ventures.
During that period, James Murdoch stayed inside the organization, rising through the ranks to run major divisions and becoming, by almost any objective measure, the more experienced executive.
When Lachlan eventually came back, Rupert installed him in a leadership role that put him above James, despite James having spent years actually running the company.
The series presents this decision not as a simple matter of birth order or business strategy, but as something more personal: Lachlan was politically aligned with his father in a way James was not.
The Phone-Hacking Scandal That Nearly Destroyed Everything
One of the most dramatic sequences in the documentary revisits the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, one of the biggest press scandals in British history.
During the 2000s, reporters at the Murdoch-owned tabloid used private investigators to illegally access the voicemail messages of celebrities, politicians, crime victims, and the families of murder victims.
The story exploded in 2011 when it emerged that journalists had hacked the phone of murdered 13-year-old Milly Dowler, and that an investigator had deleted messages from her voicemail, inadvertently giving her family false hope that she was still alive.
The public and political response was overwhelming. Murdoch executives were summoned before Parliament.
Dozens of journalists were arrested. The paper was shut down after 168 years of publication, and Murdoch’s companies ultimately paid more than a billion pounds in legal settlements and costs.
For James Murdoch, who had overseen the British newspaper division at the time, the damage was catastrophic.
A parliamentary committee declared him “not a fit person” to run a major international corporation. That finding effectively ended his chances of succeeding his father, a verdict the documentary explores in depth.
The Fox News Scandals
The series then turns to the wave of sexual harassment scandals that shook Fox News beginning in 2016.
In July of that year, former anchor Gretchen Carlson filed a lawsuit against Fox News CEO Roger Ailes accusing him of sexual harassment.
Other women, including Megyn Kelly, followed with their own accounts. With around 20 women eventually making allegations, Ailes resigned within weeks, denying the accusations but leaving behind the network he had built and shaped since its founding.
The following year, in April 2017, longtime primetime anchor Bill O’Reilly was removed after reports revealed that he and the network had reached multiple financial settlements with women accusing him of harassment.
In 2017, 21st Century Fox paid $90 million to resolve shareholder claims related to how the company had handled the harassment allegations internally.
The documentary examines the role both Lachlan and James Murdoch played in removing Ailes, and what the scandal revealed about the culture Fox News had cultivated under the leadership they had inherited.
The Political Break That Split The Family
As the series develops, the ideological divide between James and the rest of the family becomes impossible to ignore.
While Rupert and Lachlan embraced and defended Fox News’s strongly conservative direction, including its role in elevating and sustaining Donald Trump’s political career, James grew increasingly uncomfortable with it.
The moment that made the break explicit came on August 12, 2017, when a white supremacist drove a car into counterprotesters at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.
Trump’s response, in which he suggested there were “very fine people on both sides,” drew widespread condemnation.
James publicly criticized the president. His father and brother did not.
According to the documentary, that moment didn’t just reflect a political disagreement.
It deepened an already severe personal divide that would shape everything that followed.
The Disney Sale And James’s Disappearance
One of the more surprising moments the documentary covers is Rupert Murdoch’s decision to sell the bulk of 21st Century Fox’s entertainment assets to The Walt Disney Company.
The $71 billion deal, which closed in 2019, transferred 20th Century Fox’s film studio and the majority of its television and entertainment catalog to Disney.
The Murdoch empire contracted sharply, refocusing around news, sports, and Fox Corporation.
For James, the sale had represented a potential path to reinvention — a chance to take a leadership role within the merged entity.
It never happened. Lachlan remained the heir apparent within the leaner company, and James effectively exited the business.
The Secret Trust Trial — And Its Stunning Outcome
The final act of the documentary, and the story’s most extraordinary chapter, centers on a legal battle that played out almost entirely in secret.
The Murdoch Family Trust is a financial structure that determines who controls the empire after Rupert’s death.
In private proceedings, Murdoch allegedly sought to alter the trust to ensure that Lachlan alone would have voting control, effectively cutting James, Elisabeth, and Prudence out of any meaningful say in the future of the companies.
The three siblings challenged the move in a Nevada court. What followed was a proceeding in which years of private family communications, including emails and text messages in which Rupert and Lachlan criticized James’s political views, were entered into evidence.
At one point, James reportedly became emotional while reading messages in which his own father and sibling had attacked him.
In late 2024, the Nevada court ruled against Rupert Murdoch, finding that he and Lachlan had acted in bad faith. It appeared, on paper, to be a major victory for James, Elisabeth, and Prudence.
But what actually happened next was not a victory.
Who Won — And What It Cost
After the ruling, the family entered private settlement negotiations. The result: Lachlan Murdoch will retain effective control of News Corp and Fox Corporation after Rupert’s death regardless.
In exchange, James, Elisabeth, and Prudence agreed to step away entirely from leadership roles at both companies.
The three will receive a combined payout of approximately $3.3 billion tied to their stakes in the family holdings.
The trust has been restructured to include Rupert’s two youngest daughters, Grace and Chloe, his children with Wendi Deng as beneficiaries who will receive dividends.
But the voting rights attached to their shares will be controlled by Lachlan. The trust is expected to remain in place until 2050, when Grace and Chloe will be adults in a position to potentially assert themselves.
As journalist Jim Rutenberg says at the close of the series: “That is what being a Murdoch really cost them.”
Dynasty: The Murdochs is streaming now on Netflix. All four episodes are available.
