Nancy Oliver is a writer first and a director once, and what she writes is the same thing every time: a true feeling set down inside a premise that ought to make it impossible. It works more often than it has any right to.
Fi1m perspective
Somebody in the Fisher family will see exactly what they are doing wrong, say so, and then do it anyway. That is the joke in Six Feet Under (2001) most weeks, and Nancy Oliver is one of the writers who kept telling it, alongside Alan Ball, Kate Robin and Craig Wright. The funeral home downstairs means no domestic grievance is ever far from a body. We laughed at the Fishers and then felt slightly bad about laughing, and the programme meant us to: the jokes are harsh, but they never pretend the misery underneath is imaginary.
Oliver came to television late and by way of the stage. She met Ball as a student in Florida, co-founded a theatre company in Sarasota and worked with him in the theatre before either of them wrote for television. She moved to Los Angeles in 1997, and it was his writing staff she joined for the last three seasons of Six Feet Under (2003 to 2005). Her one feature screenplay, Lars and the Real Girl (2007), is about a man's attachment to a sex doll. Then came True Blood (2008 to 2011) as writer and producer, Here and Now (2018), and Angelyne (2022), a miniseries she created.
The pattern is plain enough. Give her vampires or a doll and she writes the scene underneath as if neither were there. She has said the challenge of True Blood was "to write moving scenes with truth and emotion — in a context that was frankly, joyfully ridiculous", which is as good a description of her work as we could manage. It is also why the Louisiana series is far better written than it needs to be for about three seasons, and why Anna Paquin has something to hold on to after the plotting has stopped trying.
She directed exactly one episode, 'To Love Is to Bury', the penultimate one of the first season, and the label "director" flatters the shape of the career. She is a writer, mostly on staffs run by Ball, and the honest difficulty with a staff writer is that we cannot tell you which line is hers. What we can say is that both series she worked on treat people who are absurd without treating their unhappiness as absurd, and that the one script with only her name on it starts from the same place.
If you want to hear her without Ball beside her, Lars and the Real Girl is the only place to do it.
Biography
Nancy Oliver (born 8 February 1955) is an American playwright and screenwriter. She earned a BA in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an MA in acting and directing from Florida State University, where she met Alan Ball.
Oliver joined the writing staff of the HBO series Six Feet Under (2001) in its third season as a staff writer and later served as co-producer and story editor. She wrote the screenplay for the 2007 film Lars and the Real Girl, which received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. She later worked as a writer and producer on True Blood (2008) and wrote episodes of Here and Now (2018). In 2022 she created the miniseries Angelyne.
