Brad Falchuk has spent two decades writing beside Ryan Murphy, and the series they built together share a pattern: a first year that is sharp, odd and generous, then seasons that forget what made it so. He is at his best at the start of things.
Fi1m perspective
The Murphy and Falchuk programmes start with somebody deciding to leave. In Pose (2018), Blanca walks out of the House of Abundance in the first episode and starts a house of her own. In Glee (2009), a Spanish teacher decides a failing show choir is his to rescue. In Nip/Tuck (2003), two surgeons have already made their choice and spend seven seasons paying for it. Then the joke arrives, usually a cruel one, and the trick is that the join barely shows. Falchuk's name is on all three. Where his work ends and Murphy's begins is not a question we can answer from the sofa, and we will not pretend to.
What we can say is where he has been. He began on science fiction, Mutant X (2001) and Earth: Final Conflict (2001–02), and joined Nip/Tuck as a writer in 2003, rising to executive producer and director. Glee followed, co-created with Murphy and Ian Brennan; American Horror Story (2011), with Murphy; Pose, with Murphy and Steven Canals; 9-1-1 (2018), with Murphy and Tim Minear. Only with The Brothers Sun (2024), co-created with Byron Wu, did he run a series largely on his own. That is a long partnership, and it is fair to judge its work as his.
The pattern in our scores is hard to miss. Nip/Tuck is sharp for two seasons and over seven loses its nerve and then its mind. Glee was, for one year, the sharpest and oddest comedy on American television, with Jane Lynch as its poison; five more seasons followed and the programme forgot which parts of itself were the good ones. Falchuk has since said, more or less, that success went to its head, and we believe him. Soap, sitcom and musical in the same hour works as long as somebody is deciding, scene by scene, which one is in charge. When nobody is, the thing sprawls.
Pose is the best of the three, and the one where his own account of the job is most interesting. He has described sitting in writers' rooms that were not his and keeping quiet: "We had an all-Asian writers room, so there were a lot of times where I didn't talk. I just listen." Listening produced a warm, generous, superbly dressed drama with Billy Porter and Dominique Jackson leading an ensemble that earns its tears. We wept at it more than we expected to, and never during the speeches, which run long and stop the show at every doctor's office; it was Jackson's Elektra, and the house she rules, that did it. The white men in the cast are dull, which is an odd thing to have to say about a series with three men's names on the credits, and we suspect the writers knew.
So The Brothers Sun asks whether the first-year rule belongs to Falchuk or to the partnership. We have not reviewed it and will not guess. If you want the case for him, watch the first season of Glee, then all three of Pose, and leave the rest of the shelf alone.
Biography
Brad Falchuk is an American television writer, director and producer. He graduated from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in 1993 and received a master's degree in screenwriting from the AFI Conservatory.
He began his career writing for series such as Mutant X (2001) and Earth: Final Conflict (2001–02). He joined the writing staff of Nip/Tuck (2003) and directed episodes of the series. With Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, he co-created Glee (2009), on which he also wrote and directed. He has since co-created further series with Murphy, including American Horror Story (2011), Scream Queens (2015) and Pose (2018). He is married to actress Gwyneth Paltrow.
