Director Adam McKay won the Director's Guild Award for outstanding directing in a Drama Series for this episode.
Show creator, Jesse Armstrong initially conceived the series as a feature film about the Murdoch family, but the script never went into production. Armstrong eventually expanded the scope of the story to include the larger landscape of Wall Street, which he felt better suited for a television format. Armstrong wrote a new script centered on original characters loosely inspired by various powerful media families such as the Murdochs, the Redstones and the Sulzbergers.
Brian Cox, like the character he plays, was indeed born in Dundee.
According to series creator Jesse Armstrong, the table read with the cast was held on November 8, 2016, Election Day, and filming began on the pilot the next day.
The name of the pilot episode is an ode to the Danish movie "Festen", also known as "The Celebration" by Thomas Vinterberg in 1998. It's a Dogme film, and Succession takes the camera work from this, like a sort of documentary style camera work.