Marti Noxon is at her strongest when a genre story gives a difficult woman room to be angry, evasive or wrong. We rate her highly, though the dialogue can be too pleased with itself and the stories too long.
Fi1m perspective
In Sharp Objects (2018), Amy Adams's reporter Camille Preaker goes home to Wind Gap to cover a murder. Soon her mother's house matters more than the investigation. We were unsettled by that shift, because the series makes us attend to what this town did to Camille before she left. Noxon gives Camille's difficulties time and attention instead of treating them as background information for the next piece of detective work.
Noxon had already used supernatural stories to explore recognisable hurt in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997). She joined as story editor in the second season and later became showrunner for the sixth and seventh. Alongside writers Joss Whedon and Jane Espenson, she helped make a programme whose dialogue sometimes gives everyone the same supply of ready answers. Sarah Michelle Gellar makes the heroine's irritation affecting, but the scripts can interrupt an unpleasant feeling with a joke just when it needs time. The performances give us good reason to forgive the writing, though not on every occasion.
Work as a writer on the patient, absorbing Mad Men (2007) was followed by series she helped shape from the outset. With UnREAL (2015), co-created with Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, the workplace was reality television production. She then created Dietland (2018), a dark comedy about body image and anger. These choices make sense for a writer drawn to women who make bad decisions and still deserve the story's attention.
For Sharp Objects, Noxon adapts Gillian Flynn's novel, while Jean-Marc Vallée directs all eight episodes. The cutting is restless but precise, and Adams and Patricia Clarkson give us reason to stay through the pauses. Eight episodes are about two too many, with the middle particularly slow. That is a real flaw in a series so dependent on sustained attention. Start there, with patience for a murder mystery more interested in Camille than in supplying the next clue.
Biography
Marti Noxon is an American television and film writer, director and producer. She graduated with a B.A. in Theatre Arts from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1987.
Noxon joined the writing staff of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997) in its second season and rose to executive producer and showrunner. She wrote or co-wrote numerous episodes and directed two. She later served as consulting producer and writer on Mad Men (2007), contributing to two Writers Guild of America Awards for Best Dramatic Series.
Her other credits include creating and executive producing UnREAL (2015) and Sharp Objects (2018), writing the films I Am Number Four (2011) and Fright Night (2011), and writing and directing To the Bone (2017).
