Daniel Minahan

Watch an episode of Deadwood without checking who directed it and you will not be able to tell. That is the job, and Daniel Minahan is unusually good at it. Across seven series we have reviewed, from Six Feet Under (2001) through Deadwood (2004), Grey's Anatomy (2005), Big Love (2006), True Blood (2008), The Good Wife (2009) and Game of Thrones (2011), our notices praise the writing and the casts and do not mention him once. We mean that as a compliment. A television director who gets noticed has usually broken something.

He came in from the side. He co-wrote and did second-unit work on I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), then wrote and directed Series 7: The Contenders (2001), a mock reality programme in which the contestants kill each other, which found a cult and remains the one place his own voice is unmistakable. Then television took him and kept him: Six Feet Under from 2003, Deadwood from 2004 through all three seasons and the 2019 film, five episodes of Game of Thrones across its first and third seasons, Homeland, The Good Wife. Four jobs with David Milch, three with Ryan Murphy. It is a career built on being trusted with other people's shows.

He has said of Six Feet Under that you could turn it on at any point and know at once what you were watching. That is the whole of his method: match the palette, match the lenses, block the scene the way the last director blocked it, and let the writing do the work. We found the Fishers exhausting company and kept coming back to them anyway, and part of what made that possible was a house that looked and behaved the same way every week. The show never made us relearn it. On Deadwood we sometimes wished somebody would interrupt McShane; we never wished the camera were somewhere else.

The recent work is where he has stepped forward. Halston (2021) is all five episodes his. He directed the first two of Fellow Travelers (2023), which runs from the McCarthy hearings to the AIDS years and which he also produced, and then the feature On Swift Horses (2024), about desire and its concealment in 1950s America. These are stories of queer lives in periods that did not allow them, and he has said he wanted no distance between what the characters felt and what we watched. We have not reviewed the three and will not judge them at length here. We will note that the complaint following On Swift Horses, that it is earnest and too tidy about repression, is the one you would expect of a man who spent twenty years learning not to show his hand. Asked to show it, he may need a little longer.