Craig Mazin makes patient, frightening television about people trying to survive. We recommend his dramas warmly, though he sometimes explains too much and gives supporting characters too little time to earn the feelings he wants from us.
Fi1m perspective
In Chernobyl (2019), Valery Legasov speaks into a cassette recorder before the series returns to the night of the reactor explosion. Craig Mazin then stays with that night for most of an hour, showing what happened in order and keeping track of who knew what. We found that first hour frightening because it makes us follow the disaster without the relief of jumping ahead. His patience is valuable here, although the urge to make everything clear will later become a problem.
His earlier work was in comedy films, with a writing credit on Senseless (1998). He co-wrote The Hangover Part II (2011). The move into limited-series drama came with Chernobyl, which he created and wrote; the work we most readily recommend begins with that change.
Across its five episodes, Chernobyl shows both the care Mazin takes and his reluctance to trust us once we have understood. Mazin and Johan Renck keep the account exact and frightening, but the repeated physics lessons eventually make it feel like a school assembly. Jared Harris gives Legasov the weight to hold our attention through the explanations. Costume designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux puts the men in deliberately similar grey suits, and the writing takes time to distinguish those who are lying from those who are frightened. That confusion is worth tolerating; the extra instruction less so.
In The Last of Us (2023), Mazin and fellow writer Neil Druckmann give Joel and Ellie the time together that makes familiar zombie threats worth sitting through. Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey make that attention pay off, and the first series earns its emotion by allowing people to care about one another. Not everyone gets that chance: some supporting characters must make an impression before the scripts have given them enough room. The familiar apocalypse situations also remain familiar, however seriously the writers take them. Try the first series for Pascal and Ramsey, rather than for a reinvention of the zombie story.
Biography
Craig Mazin is an American writer, director and producer. He was born on 8 April 1971 in Brooklyn, New York City, and graduated magna cum laude with a degree in psychology from Princeton University in 1992.
He began his career writing comedy films including Scary Movie 3 (2003), Scary Movie 4 (2006), Superhero Movie (2008), which he also directed, The Hangover Part II (2011), The Hangover Part III (2013) and Identity Thief (2013). Mazin later created, wrote and produced the HBO miniseries Chernobyl (2019), for which he won two Primetime Emmy Awards. He co-created, wrote and executive produced the HBO series The Last of Us (2023–present) with Neil Druckmann, and has directed episodes of the series.
