Dan Fogelman writes about families in pain and then wraps the pain in a puzzle. When the cast is good enough to sell the feeling, as in Paradise and Tangled, the trick works; when the plotting shows through, the feeling starts to look arranged.
Fi1m perspective
A Dan Fogelman scene tends to be doing two things at once. In the foreground somebody is grieving, or failing to say the thing they walked in to say. Underneath it the plot is keeping a secret, and the scene has been built so that the secret will pay off later as a jolt. In Paradise (2025) a murder is being solved while a man's private losses take up as much space as the investigation, and we found the losses more persuasive than the surprises. In Tangled (2010) the machinery is a Grimm fairy tale, which does the plotting for him, and the film is calmer for it.
He came up through animation and comedy. Cars (2006) at Pixar was the first credit, then Tangled, then Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011), an ensemble comedy about adult relationships directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, where his habit of putting well-known actors into flawed, ordinary parts is already in place. Then he directed twice: Danny Collins (2015), with Al Pacino as a musician after redemption, and Life Itself (2018), several stories about memory and loss set side by side. Neither was much liked; critics found the first familiar and contrived, the second sentimental. Between them came This Is Us (2016–2022), the long-running family drama that made his name, built on ensemble casting and on telling a family's story through what its members remember. Paradise is his first series since.
What works is the casting, and the space he gives to feeling once he has cast well. Sterling K. Brown has now made two things with him, and in Paradise it is Brown who makes the improbable turns worth following. A convincing performance will persuade an audience to overlook an unconvincing explanation; Fogelman knows this and leans on it. What does not work is the same instinct pushed further, when the surprises arrive faster than the characters can absorb them. The second season of Paradise asks for patience with loose plotting and flashbacks, and patience is not the same as being moved.
The lantern sequence in Tangled got to us more than we had any right to expect from a studio cartoon. A girl who has spent the whole story wanting one thing is finally given it, and the film stops talking and lets her look. Nothing else in the screenplay is on that level, and we said so at the time, and it did not spoil our evening.
He has said he writes quickly but thinks about things for a long time before he starts, and the work bears that out: the feeling has always been planned. The question is whether the puzzle is there for the people or the people for the puzzle. On television, with hours to fill and a cast to share the weight, it has been the people. In the two films he directed himself, the reviews suggest the puzzle won. We would take another series from him before another film, and we would want Brown in it.
Biography
Dan Fogelman is an American screenwriter, film director and producer. Born on 19 February 1976 in River Vale, New Jersey, he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997.
His screenplays include the Pixar films Cars (2006), Bolt (2008) and Tangled (2010), as well as Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011), The Guilt Trip (2012) and Last Vegas (2013). He wrote and directed Life Itself (2018).
Fogelman created the television series This Is Us (2016–2022) and Paradise (2025), serving as writer and showrunner on the latter. He has also been an executive producer on Only Murders in the Building.
