Michelle Ashford writes about real people doing real work, and she is at her best when she treats the work as the drama: the funding, the credit, the measuring. Her weakness is shape, which shows whenever a whole life has to fit the running time.
Fi1m perspective
A volunteer is wired to a machine in a hospital basement and asked to carry on as if nobody were watching. That is the scene Michelle Ashford keeps returning to in Masters of Sex (2013), and it tells you what kind of writer she is. The obvious version of a drama about William Masters and Virginia Johnson would have been tasteful nudity with a bow tie in the corner. Ashford wrote instead about who gets funded, who gets credited and who is allowed to watch, and she played the wiring-up with a straight face, which turned out to be funnier and sadder than any wink.
She served a long apprenticeship first, writing episodes for network series from the late 1980s, among them 21 Jump Street and Cagney & Lacey, and then staff work on Boomtown and L.A. Doctors. The turn came with the historical miniseries: John Adams (2008), then The Pacific (2010). Masters of Sex, drawn from Thomas Maier's book, was the series she created and ran herself from 2013 to 2016, and it is the one that fixed her reputation as an adapter of real lives. She has since moved to features, with Operation Mincemeat (2022), from Ben Macintyre's account of a wartime deception, and Cat Person (2023), from the New Yorker short story, and she has contributed to Mayfair Witches.
What works is her interest in the work inside the life. She has said there is something profoundly moving in writing about people who actually did real, huge things, and on screen the moving part is usually the argument over the paperwork. We had expected to be titillated or embarrassed by the laboratory episodes of Masters of Sex and were instead touched, because the volunteers are so anxious to be useful and Ashford never once mocks them for it. Annaleigh Ashford's Betty DiMello, the prostitute who recruits the first subjects and talks to Masters as an equal, is the kind of supporting part she writes well: someone with a job to do and an opinion about how it is being done.
What does not always work is the shape. In John Adams, credited to Kirk Ellis and Ashford, the attention given to each part of Adams's life can feel determined by a duty to include it, and Melanie Oliver's editing cannot always find the forward movement the conversations lack. Masters of Sex has the same trouble in a different place. It is sharp in the basement with Sheen and Caplan and it goes slack whenever it leaves them for the suburbs, as if the private lives had been kept in because they happened rather than because they helped.
She writes best when someone else has done the living and she has to decide what mattered. The risk of that method is that everything seems to matter equally, and seven episodes of John Adams are the proof. A feature has a running time that will not stretch, and on the evidence so far that may be the discipline she needs.
Biography
Michelle Ashford is an American screenwriter and television producer. She began her career in the 1980s with writing credits on series including 21 Jump Street and progressed through shows such as Boomtown and L.A. Doctors before contributing to historical miniseries.
She wrote an episode of the HBO miniseries John Adams (2008) and episodes of The Pacific (2010), for which she received an Emmy nomination. Ashford created, developed and wrote for the Showtime series Masters of Sex (2013–2016). Her later credits include the screenplay for Operation Mincemeat (2021) and work on Mayfair Witches (2023–). She is married to television writer and producer Greg Walker.
