David Mirkin is a television writer who directs so that nobody else can flatten what he wrote. On The Simpsons he made the jokes stranger and the stories about people, and the programme has never quite shaken either habit.
Fi1m perspective
Mirkin directs the things he writes, and he has said why: it is the only way to protect the tone of the material, and everything, in his phrase, comes from writing. That is a writer's suspicion of directors, held by a man who is both. It shows most in the work he is best known for, which is not a film at all but two seasons of an animated programme drawn by other people.
He came to The Simpsons as showrunner for its fifth and sixth seasons, from 1993 to 1995, after a decade in sitcom rooms on Three's Company and Newhart and a short, stubborn series of his own, Get a Life (1990), made with Chris Elliott: single-camera, dark, surreal, resisted by its network and adopted by the people who found it. He brought that taste to Springfield, and the show got weirder. At the same time it got more interested in what its people wanted. His own account is that he brought it back to stories about the characters and made them more emotional, while still keeping it surreal and weird. What our review praises in the show's best stretches, merciless jokes sitting next to real tenderness for the people making fools of themselves, is the balance he describes trying to strike. We have laughed at the cruellest of those jokes and then, a beat later, felt for the fool on the end of them, and the show is at its best when it does both in one scene.
He stayed on as writer, producer and consultant, working alongside Al Jean over many years, and co-wrote the programme's 2007 feature film. On The Larry Sanders Show he was a writer and consultant and directed one episode, 'The Beginning of the End', in 1998. Our review of that series scores it 91 and does not mention him, which is fair; it is a programme about a room full of people keeping one man happy, and he was one of them.
His two features, Romy and Michele's High School Reunion (1997) and Heartbreakers (2001), divided critics, and the first has since gathered a following. We have not reviewed either, so we will not pretend to weigh them. The shape of the career weighs them for us: after the second, he went back to Springfield, and he is still consulting there in the 2020s.
He has spent decades making sure nobody else gets to direct his jokes, and the two occasions he took that job onto a cinema screen are the ones people argue about. Television is where his kind of control has done the most good.
Biography
David Mirkin is an American television and film writer, producer and director. He began his career as a stand-up comedian before writing for series including Newhart (1982) and Get a Life (1990).
Mirkin served as executive producer and showrunner on The Simpsons (1989) for seasons 5 and 6, and has remained a writer and consulting producer on the series. He co-wrote the screenplay for The Simpsons Movie (2007) and several shorts, including Maggie Simpson in "The Longest Daycare" (2012). He has directed the feature films Romy and Michele's High School Reunion (1997) and Heartbreakers (2001).
He has won four Primetime Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award for his work on The Simpsons.
