Paul Simms writes rooms where people work and one of them is impossible, and he has been making that arrangement funny since 1992. Lately he has done something rarer: run other people's shows without making them sound like his.
Fi1m perspective
The Larry Sanders Show (1992) runs on the same engine every week. A chat show has to go out that night, the host is anxious, Hank wants something, and Artie sorts it out by telling everyone a different story. Paul Simms wrote and produced on it from 1992 to 1994, and the arrangement stuck. NewsRadio (1995), which he created and ran until 1999, is a workplace of eccentrics played deadpan; What We Do in the Shadows (2019), which he ran for six years, is much the same thing with vampires. He likes a room where people are paid to be there and one of them makes it unbearable.
He came out of Spy magazine and started on Late Night with David Letterman in 1990, which accounts for the dryness. The Larry Sanders Show followed, then NewsRadio. After that the career turns. He wrote and directed on Flight of the Conchords (2007–2009), wrote an episode of Boardwalk Empire (2010), and became an executive producer on Atlanta and Girls. From 2019 he was showrunner on What We Do in the Shadows, and in 2024 on English Teacher. For most of this century he has been making other people's shows.
That is harder to review than it sounds. Our notices for The Larry Sanders Show, Flight of the Conchords and Boardwalk Empire do not single him out, and that is not an oversight. A staff writer you can pick out of a Garry Shandling episode is a staff writer who has got in the way. What we can say is that the shows he touches share a temperature: nobody raises their voice, the absurd thing is treated as ordinary, and the joke is usually somebody's dignity. We watched Rip Torn's Artie talk Larry down before a taping again for this piece and laughed out loud, alone, at a line we knew was coming, because it is delivered as if it were simply true. That is the manner Simms learned there and took to NewsRadio.
The weakness is on the record. His own creations have tended to be admired and cut short, NewsRadio and Flight of the Conchords among them, and our own review of the Conchords says why: the songs lift the show and the ordinary plots between them ask for patience. Simms has said, "I want to see other people's lives," and his second act has been spent doing exactly that. By his own account the job now is working out what a writer wants to say and finding the best way for them to say it, which is a modest description of a difficult skill.
If you want to hear him, start with The Larry Sanders Show. If you want to see what he does now, watch Atlanta or What We Do in the Shadows and try to find him. You will not, and that is the point.
Biography
Paul Simms is an American television writer and producer. He began his career writing for Late Night with David Letterman in 1990 and contributed to The Larry Sanders Show. He created and served as head writer and executive producer on the NBC sitcom NewsRadio (1995–1999).
Simms has written for and directed episodes of Flight of the Conchords (2007–2009), for which he also acted as consulting producer. His other credits include writing episodes of Boardwalk Empire (2010), Girls (2014–2015) and What We Do in the Shadows (2019–2024), and serving as executive producer on Atlanta (2016–2022) and Divorce (2016). He has also written for English Teacher (2024).
He grew up partly in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, graduated from Harvard University, and previously worked at Spy magazine. Simms has contributed to The New Yorker.
