A writer of genre television who plants things early and waits years to collect. Fringe is where the patience pays, once it has spent a season finding out what it is for; the one studio film of his we have reviewed is half a good one.
Fi1m perspective
In Fringe, Walter Bishop cannot remember his assistant's name. It is a small joke, and J. H. Wyman and his fellow writers run it for five years without wearing it out, which tells you most of what you need to know about how he works. He plants things early and waits. The 2008 pilot looks like a tidy copy of The X-Files, a badge and a case a week, and it takes most of a season to find out what it is for. Stay with it.
He came to writing from acting, working in the 1990s under the name Joel Wyner, and his first feature credit was Pale Saints (1997). The Mexican (2001) was his first major studio script, and it is built on one idea: put Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts on the poster and keep them in different countries for most of 123 minutes. Half of it works. Roberts in a car with James Gandolfini is a long conversation we wanted to stay in; Pitt losing a pistol in the dust is a slapstick errand that outlasts the joke. The structure came first and the people second, and only Gandolfini's half gets any.
Television gave him room. He created Keen Eddie (2003), then joined Fringe in 2008 as writer and co-executive producer, rose to co-showrunner alongside Jeff Pinkner and finished running it alone, directing two episodes including the last. Anna Torv's Olivia Dunham reads as flat in the first year, and by the second the writers have worked out that the quiet is the character. Joshua Jackson's Peter starts sardonic about his father and then, so gradually we did not notice the change until it had happened, is not. We came for the strange cases and stayed for the Bishops; by the second season we were more worried about John Noble's Walter than about anything coming through a wall, and nothing in the pilot warned us we would mind that much. The programme uses its science to ask what a person is and whom they can trust, and that is the question Wyman's writing has kept asking since.
His own series, Almost Human (2013), a human and an android as partners, and Debris (2021), are hopeful rather than bleak, and he likes to know his ending before he starts: "I’m not interested in leaving it open-ended. That would just cause me frustration. I wouldn’t be satisfied." That is the right instinct for a writer who plays the long game, and it depends on being allowed to play it. Keen Eddie and Almost Human each ended after a single season, so whatever he had planted there never came up. Start with Fringe, give it the season it needs, and if you do watch The Mexican, wait for the car.
Biography
J. H. Wyman is an American-born Canadian writer, producer and director. Born Joel Howard Wyman on 5 January 1967 in Oakland, California, he grew up in Montreal and trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Los Angeles. He began his career as an actor under the name Joel Wyner before moving into writing and producing in the late 1990s.
Wyman wrote and produced the feature film The Mexican (2001). He created the series Keen Eddie (2003) and joined Fringe (2008–2013) as a writer and co-executive producer, later becoming co-showrunner and directing two episodes. He created and showran Almost Human (2013–2014) and Debris (2021), and wrote and produced the film Dead Man Down (2013).
