Rolin Jones is a playwright who writes television as if the talk were the point, and it often is. He takes famous names and old books and gives them dirt under the nails; the pleasure is in the sentences, and the pace is the weakness.
Fi1m perspective
The first thing Rolin Jones does with Perry Mason, the tidiest lawyer in American popular fiction, is take his tie off. In the 2020 series he made with Ron Fitzgerald, Mason is not a lawyer at all yet. It is Los Angeles in 1932 and he is a private investigator with a bad war behind him, a divorce, a suit that has not seen a hanger, and a job photographing comedians in bed with the wrong women. That is the Jones habit in one picture: take a name everyone knows, or a book everyone has read, and put it back in the dirt, where the talk is better.
He came to television from the theatre, where his play The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow (2003) was about technology and loneliness, and his early screen credits were in other people's rooms: Weeds (2005), Friday Night Lights (2006), for which he wrote the episode "The Son", and Boardwalk Empire (2010). We scored all three well and our reviews did not single him out, which is the ordinary fate of a staff writer and not a complaint. What those years taught him, on the evidence of what came after, was how to write lines that actors can say out loud. Asked what he liked about adapting Anne Rice, he said: "First is that you get to write language." It is a candid thing for a screenwriter to admit, and it is where his strengths and his faults both start.
The strength is the sentence. The fault is what happens between the sentences. Eight episodes of Perry Mason take its hero from a dairy barn to a courtroom, and we thought three of them could go. It is, as we said at the time, decent, often beautiful and frequently slow. We sat through the middle of that first series liking the light and Matthew Rhys's unshaven face and growing quietly impatient, because Jones and Fitzgerald had a man worth watching and kept finding reasons not to put him where the title says he belongs. Jones stepped back after that one series.
The pattern has repeated. He created Interview with the Vampire (2022) for AMC, ran it for three series, the third retitled The Vampire Lestat, and has stepped back from running the fourth while staying on as executive producer. We have not reviewed it, so we will say only that it is the fullest example so far of the thing he does: a thick gothic novel mined for dialogue and given a modern ear. Ron Fitzgerald has been beside him on three projects, and the two seem to work best when there is a text to argue with.
So Jones is, twice now, a builder of first series. What he leaves behind is a show with its manners established and its pace still to be found, and somebody else gets to find it. When his name is on the next one, watch the opening episode for the talk and give the second a fair hearing. Do not expect anyone on screen to be in a hurry.
Biography
Rolin Jones is an American playwright, television writer and showrunner. Born on 22 September 1972 in Los Angeles, California, he grew up in the Woodland Hills area and graduated from California State University, Northridge and the Yale School of Drama.
His play The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow premiered in 2003 and was a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Jones began writing for television on Weeds from 2005. He joined Friday Night Lights as a writer and supervising producer for its fourth season in 2009, writing episodes including "The Son", for which he received an Emmy nomination.
Jones has written for Boardwalk Empire, United States of Tara, Perry Mason and Life in Pieces. He created and served as showrunner on the AMC series Interview with the Vampire (2022).
