David Greenwalt is a writer worth following for the people in his supernatural stories. The programmes he helped shape can be uneven, but their humour and emotional pull usually give us good reason to stay.
Fi1m perspective
Sarah Michelle Gellar lets Buffy's irritation survive the jokes and the supernatural trouble. That matters: a heroine who can be funny and affecting without becoming agreeable gives a writer something to work with. David Greenwalt helped establish Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997) as a writer, director and co-executive producer, working with Joss Whedon. We were moved by Gellar's Buffy because she never had to become sweet or patient to earn our affection. The series' uneven supernatural plotting is easier to forgive when its heroine feels so recognisably difficult.
Before the supernatural programmes, Greenwalt wrote films with Jim Kouf, including Class (1983) and Secret Admirer (1985), which he also directed. His television writing and directing included The Wonder Years (1988), and that work belongs in any account of what he does well. Fred Savage makes adolescence funny and touching without making it easy, an approach that sits comfortably beside Greenwalt's later interest in character-led fantasy. Our reservation with the series is Daniel Stern's narration, which sometimes explains what the actors have already made clear. The writing needs to leave the performances enough room.
The X-Files (1993), to which he contributed as a writer and producer, makes the same case for the value of a strong central performance, or two. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson make its unexplained events absorbing company, though the secrecy can try our patience. We would not assign either the pleasure or the frustration to Greenwalt alone. His responsibility became clearer on Angel (1999), the Buffy spin-off he co-created with Whedon and ran for its first three seasons. His stated emphasis on what happens to the characters helps explain why humour and hurt matter so much in his genre work.
With Grimm (2011), he returned to Kouf to co-create a supernatural procedural. Kouf's presence also prevents us from treating the Whedon years as the whole story. We value Greenwalt's preference for developing characters over simply solving cases, but the stories still need to make sense. Start with Buffy, allowing for some uneven plotting along the way.
Biography
David Greenwalt is an American screenwriter, director and producer. Born on 16 October 1949 in Los Angeles, California, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in drama, English and education from the University of Redlands after earlier studies at Los Angeles City College and California State University, Northridge.
He began his career writing and directing feature films in the 1980s, often in collaboration with Jim Kouf, before moving into television. Greenwalt wrote and directed episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997), serving as co-executive producer and later executive producer on the series; he also wrote an episode of The X-Files (1993). He co-created the spin-off Angel (1999) with Joss Whedon and co-created the series Grimm (2011), on which he served as executive producer and writer. Other credits include work on The Wonder Years (1988), The Commish (1993) and Profit (1996).
