Miles Millar

A boy on a Kansas farm outruns a truck and does not know why. A girl in a black dress is sent to a school full of other people's monsters and treats it as a punishment. A ghost in a striped suit comes back and finds the film has a teenager's grief to see to before it can get round to him. Miles Millar writes with Alfred Gough, and has since the 1990s, and the shape of what they write is easy to see once you have watched two of them: a famous character with the famous bit held back, and someone young standing where it used to be. Millar has said as much himself: "We gravitate towards stories of teenagers who are grappling with bad situations."

The pair met on the producing programme at USC and sold a script while still students. They wrote features first, Lethal Weapon 4 (1998) and Shanghai Noon (2000), then made their name with Smallville (2001), which they created and ran for seven seasons before leaving; the show carried on until 2011 without them. The story for Spider-Man 2 (2004) came in between, and Into the Badlands (2015–2019) gave them a martial-arts world to build from nothing. The recent phase belongs to Tim Burton: Wednesday (2022), which they created and write, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024), for which they wrote the screenplay.

The pitch is always sound and it is always stated early. Smallville lays out its idea in the first hour, and for two or three seasons it is sturdy Tuesday-night television, chiefly because Michael Rosenbaum and John Glover play the Luthors better than the show required. Then it kept going. Somewhere in the middle seasons we found we could tell from the first minute of an episode what its last would be, and we resented it, because we had liked the show; about a third of its 216 episodes are the same episode. Wednesday has a different problem. The writing hands its heroine the tasks any teenage detective might be given, and it is Jenna Ortega, not the script, who makes them funny. An Addams should make ordinary behaviour look ridiculous, and here the ordinary conventions of teen television are treated with too much respect.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is the pattern in miniature. Gough and Millar give Catherine O'Hara the best lines and the one running joke that lands every time, then run at least five plots, so that no thread gets long enough to matter and Ortega, in the only part written without jokes, is rather wasted. A good idea, a good line, and then more of everything than the story can carry.

So the recommendation is the same each time: the early seasons of Smallville, Wednesday for Ortega, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice for O'Hara. Millar and Gough know how to open a door. What to do once everyone is through it is the part they have not yet solved.