Ben Edlund gives monsters and superheroes room to look ridiculous without abandoning their stories. We value his appetite for the absurd, though the joke can sometimes sound as if it belongs in a different programme.
Fi1m perspective
An Edlund episode will often make fun of the television conventions it relies on. He enjoys self-reference, absurdity and sudden changes of tone, and we like his willingness to let a genre programme become ridiculous. That habit runs back to The Tick, the satirical superhero comic he launched in 1988 before its animated and live-action adaptations. The risk is that the comic detour feels out of place in the programme around it.
Firefly (2002) put him on Joss Whedon's writing staff, working within a science-fiction Western whose chief pleasure is its company. We recommend it warmly: the cast makes the humour feel companionable, though the series sometimes cuts a serious moment short with an easy joke. Edlund went on to write and direct Smile Time (2004) for Whedon's Angel, an episode that makes his liking for off-beat plotting and changes of tone particularly clear.
Supernatural (2005) gave him a longer stretch, as writer, producer and occasional director across seasons two to eight, from 2006 to 2013. His collaboration with Eric Kripke placed that comic sensibility in a programme built around monster hunts and family grief. We were moved by the early treatment of that grief, with Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles giving us reason to care between the scares. The humour works better because we care about the people involved.
The series also grows cumbersome, and its scares are uneven; cleverness alone cannot keep a long story moving. Edlund's Ghostfacers (2008) is a useful example of his interest in testing television conventions and audience expectations. He helped develop the characters and the continuing supernatural story, too, so treating him simply as the writer of the funny episodes misses part of the job. Still, the reservation about his absurdism is fair: sometimes the change of tone is too distracting, however inventive the episode may be.
Returning as creator and writer for The Tick (2016) gave him his own satirical superhero again. We would start with Firefly for the warmth, then try his Supernatural work for the more disruptive humour. A tolerance for a programme occasionally amusing itself will help.
Biography
Ben Edlund is an American writer, producer, director and cartoonist. He created the satirical superhero character The Tick while in high school; the comic series began in 1988 and led to an animated television series (1994–1996) and live-action series (2001). He studied film at the Massachusetts College of Art.
Edlund joined the writing staff of Joss Whedon's Firefly (2002) as writer and producer. He later worked on Angel (1999–2004) as writer, director and producer, and contributed to Supernatural (2005–) as writer and producer. His other credits include the screenplay for Titan A.E. (2000) and episodes of The Venture Bros. and Gotham.
