Elizabeth Meriwether writes women who want things they are not supposed to want and lets them go after them. The wanting is what she does best; the habit of having someone explain it afterwards is what holds her limited series back.
Fi1m perspective
Somewhere in every Elizabeth Meriwether series a woman wants something she is not supposed to want, and somebody nearby says so out loud. Molly Kochan in Dying for Sex (2025) wants pleasure rather than comfort. Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout (2022) wants a machine that will run a full panel of blood tests from a single drop, and cannot build one. Alice in Furious (2026) wants revenge and takes it. Meriwether is good at the wanting. She is less good at trusting us to see it without help.
She began as a playwright in New York, with productions including The Mistakes Madeline Made and Heddatron between 2006 and 2010, then went to Los Angeles and wrote No Strings Attached (2011). The same year she created New Girl, which ran seven seasons and made her a showrunner; she directed two episodes of it herself. Single Parents (2018–2020) and Bless This Mess (2019–2020), both co-created, each ended after two seasons. Then came the turn: three limited series since 2022, each adapted from a true story or a podcast, each with a woman at the centre and comedy performers around her.
The Dropout is the tidiest and the coolest. Amanda Seyfried is remarkable, and the series around her puts the dates on screen and proceeds like a textbook, which is why we scored it 70 and not higher: it shows you what happened and stops short of saying what it thinks. Dying for Sex, written with Kim Rosenstock, is the one we would press on a stranger. We laughed at its frankness, and it is occasionally rather pleased with that frankness, and then the friendship between Michelle Williams's Molly and Jenny Slate's Nikki caught us out and moved us more than a comedy about a terminal diagnosis had any right to. The difference is that Rosenstock and Meriwether let Molly want something beyond reassuring everyone around her, and the series does not apologise for it.
Furious, with Dan LeFranc in the writers' room, has the same nerve and less patience. It opens luridly, settles into something careful and well acted, and runs eight episodes when six would do. Its worst tic is one we have seen before: it does not trust Alice's silence, so other characters keep saying aloud what she must be feeling, after Rossum has already shown us.
"I like to go to the edge of what is acceptable," Meriwether has said. She does, reliably. Then she turns round and tells the audience where the edge was. She is next writing a Britney Spears screenplay, another young woman handed success early. It is the right subject for her. We would like it to be the one where she says less.
Biography
Elizabeth Meriwether is an American writer, playwright, screenwriter, producer and showrunner. She was born on 11 October 1981 in Miami, Florida, and graduated from Yale University. She also attended the Juilliard School.
Meriwether wrote the play Oliver Parker! (2010) and the screenplay for the film No Strings Attached (2011). She created the Fox sitcom New Girl (2011–2018) and the Hulu limited series The Dropout (2022) and Dying for Sex (2025), on which she is credited as writer and story. She is also creator and writer of the Hulu series Furious (2026). She has created additional series including Single Parents (2018) and Bless This Mess (2019).
