Michael Engler is the television director you only notice when you count him: a steady hand across two decades of ensemble series, and the man Julian Fellowes trusts with his dinner tables. The work is well made; how much is his is the harder question.
Fi1m perspective
Watch a dinner at Downton Abbey and count the speaking parts. There may be a dozen, each needing a line, a look and a reason to be in frame, and the scene has to move as if nobody were counting. Making that look easy is a skill, and it is the one Michael Engler has practised longest. He came from the theatre, directing on Broadway before television took him in the early 1990s, and he has kept the stage director's habit of putting the actors first and the camera second.
His career is a list of other people's series. My So-Called Life and Party of Five in 1994, The West Wing (1999), Six Feet Under (2001), Sex and the City, Deadwood (2004), then eleven episodes of 30 Rock from 2006, Masters of Sex (2013) and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015). We have liked nearly all of them, and Deadwood is among the best television we have reviewed. But an episode director on a series like these serves a house style set by someone else, and it would be dishonest to hand him the credit for Ian McShane's speeches or Tina Fey's jokes. What he can fairly claim is that showrunners kept asking him back, in half-hour comedy and hour-long drama alike, which is rarer than it sounds.
The turn came with Julian Fellowes. Engler directed four episodes of Downton Abbey and its finale, then Fellowes's script for The Chaperone (2018), his first feature, then the Downton Abbey film (2019), and he now directs and executive produces The Gilded Age (2022 onwards). This is the first long stretch where the work is his to shape, and it suits what he does: large casts, social rank as the subject, scenes in which the thing that matters is said underneath the thing that is said. Engler has spoken of looking for "the exact balance between style and realism" in each piece, and that is a fair account of Fellowes on screen when it works: mannered enough to be a pleasure, real enough that the manners cost somebody something.
Our reservation about Downton Abbey was that it explains itself too often and goes soft on its masters, and that is a writer's fault before it is a director's. Still, a director who never argues with his writer shares the bill. We should also own that the show in his filmography we enjoyed most is 30 Rock, which made us laugh out loud more often than anything else here, and we cannot tell you with a straight face how much of that was him. That is the episodic director's lot: thirty years of good television, and effort that does not show is hard to review.
The Gilded Age gives him the longest run he has had in charge of anything. It will tell us whether there is an Engler style or only an Engler competence, and we would settle for the latter; there is not enough of it about.
Biography
Michael Engler is an American director and television producer. He began his career in theatre, directing Broadway productions including Eastern Standard (1989), Mastergate (1989) and I Hate Hamlet (1991). His direction of the 2003 off-Broadway production of Talking Heads earned an Outer Critics Circle Award nomination.
Engler moved into television in the early 1990s, directing episodes of series such as Sisters, Party of Five and My So-Called Life. In the 2000s he directed for The West Wing (1999), Six Feet Under (2001) and Deadwood (2004), as well as multiple episodes of Sex and the City, for which he received an Emmy nomination. He has also directed episodes of 30 Rock, Downton Abbey and The Gilded Age, and feature films including The Chaperone (2018) and the 2019 Downton Abbey film.
