Jeffrey Addiss writes, nearly always with Will Matthews, in worlds somebody else built, and his subject is the group that holds together when it has every reason not to. It works when the group is people in a room and falls flat when it is a speech.
Fi1m perspective
The best thing in The Boroughs (2026) is not the monster. It is Denis O'Hare's Wally Baker, Clarke Peters's Art Daniels and Geena Davis's Renee Joyce, old people who are frightened of dying and also worried about what they owe the young, and who are allowed to hold both thoughts while the jokes go on around them. Addiss and his co-writers do not treat age as the punchline. We laughed, and noticed with some surprise that none of the laughing depended on anyone being old; the age is the fear underneath, not the gag on top.
He came to writing from acting and short films, met Will Matthews at Tisch, and the two have worked as a pair since. Their first large job was The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (2019), ten episodes of prequel to Jim Henson's 1982 film, made with practical puppetry and built out from a world that already existed. It ran for one season and no more. A feature, Life in a Year (2020), followed, then the story and screenplay for Kenji Kamiyama's hand-drawn The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (2024), where Philippa Boyens was a collaborator. The Boroughs, created with Matthews and produced with the Duffer Brothers, is the first time the world has been their own.
The pattern across those jobs is plain. Addiss is good at the ensemble and at the feeling that a lot of unlikely people might add up to something, and he is weak whenever the plot needs to be a machine. In The Boroughs the residents are worth the evening and the monster mystery becomes a chore. In Rohirrim, Gaia Wise's Héra is a sound idea, a shieldmaiden long before Éowyn, but four credited screenwriters gave her a stock of speeches about hope and little else to say, and Miranda Otto's narration keeps telling us what the pictures have already shown. The siege runs out of things to do in the snow, and we were bored, which is not the animators' fault.
On the Henson job he said that the 1982 film had covered two becoming one, so he wanted to talk about "the idea of many becoming one." That is the whole of his interest so far, and The Boroughs is the same idea without the puppets: a crowd that has been written off deciding it still has work to do. When the crowd is talking to each other he can write it. When the crowd has to stand on a hill and be inspiring he reaches for the speech, and the speech is never as good as the conversation.
He has now shown he can hold a group together for eight episodes without borrowing the world. The next test is whether he can build a threat that deserves them.
Biography
Jeffrey Addiss is a writer and producer. He was born on 21 November 1980 in Buffalo, New York, USA. He trained at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts and the Atlantic Theater Company Acting School in New York City.
Addiss created and wrote the Netflix series The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (2019) with Will Matthews, for which he won a Primetime Emmy Award. He wrote the screenplay and story for the animated film The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (2024) and the film Life in a Year (2020). With Matthews, he created the Netflix series The Boroughs (2026), on which he also serves as executive producer and showrunner; the series was produced by the Duffer Brothers.
