John Enbom's television is about people who have not made it, working the rooms of people who have. Party Down is where you find him at his best; on other people's programmes he is a good writer whose hand is hard to see.
Fi1m perspective
The crew from Party Down Catering turns up in white shirts and pink bow ties, sets up and serves. Every episode of Party Down (2009) is one party, and by the end of it something has gone wrong, usually because of the staff. The people holding the trays came to Los Angeles to act or to write, and the people they are serving are, more often than is comfortable, the ones who managed it. That is John Enbom's subject: the unsuccessful working the rooms of the successful.
He wrote independent features first, The Low Life (1995), about a Yale graduate getting nowhere in Los Angeles, and Starstruck (1998), before Rob Thomas hired him onto Veronica Mars (2004). There, with Thomas, Diane Ruggiero and Phil Klemmer, he helped plant the details in early episodes that pay off twenty hours later, on a first season as good as American teen television has been. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008) followed, then Party Down, which he co-created with Thomas, Dan Etheridge and Paul Rudd and ran himself. Since then he has written on Free Agents, iZombie and Only Murders in the Building (2021).
What he does well is the simple structure: one case a week, one party a week, an ensemble of people who want something and a room that will not give it to them. Adam Scott and Ken Marino anchor Party Down, and around them Enbom and his co-writers built a comedy drier and sadder than the premise suggests. We laughed at it and then, more than once, felt slightly wretched on behalf of the person we had just laughed at, because the joke and the humiliation are the same line and Enbom will not let us have one without the other. The programme stopped in 2010 and came back in 2023 as a real third season rather than a reunion, if a slightly tidier one. Enbom put it this way: "We never wanted to do a specific revival/reunion type thing. We just wanted to do more."
The difficulty with the rest of the career is the difficulty with television writers generally: we cannot see the join. The Sarah Connor Chronicles has wit as well as danger, and it also has a mixture of adolescent drama, procedural business and philosophy that grows tiring, and we could not tell you which of those was his. On Only Murders in the Building we could not point to a line and call it his either, which is not a criticism of him so much as a fact about how that show is made.
So the recommendation is narrow and firm. Watch Party Down, all three seasons, and watch the first year of Veronica Mars. The rest is honest work in other people's rooms, and the next thing from Enbom worth waiting for is the next thing that is his.
Biography
John Enbom is an American television writer and producer. He is the creator of the comedy series Party Down (2009–2023) and has written episodes of Veronica Mars (2004–2007), Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008), iZombie (2015–2019) and Only Murders in the Building (2021–).
Enbom began his career as a screenwriter on feature films including The Low Life (1995) and Starstruck (1998). He joined the writing staff of Veronica Mars after being hired by its creator Rob Thomas, a connection that led to further television work.
