Steve De Jarnatt is persuasive when ordinary human attachments meet an emergency. We rate his feel for mounting panic, while being careful not to give a visiting television director credit for an entire programme.
Fi1m perspective
A romance can become an emergency quickly in Steve De Jarnatt’s films. In Miracle Mile (1988), which he wrote and directed, romance meets real-time nuclear panic. We rate his ability to sustain that pressure without making the panic feel implausible. Cherry 2000 (1987), which he directed, also puts human connection under strain, mixing post-apocalyptic action with questions about technology.
He came to those features after co-writing the comedy Strange Brew (1983), before moving chiefly into television after the late 1980s. There, the fit between his interests and the assignment matters more than any claim to authorship of a whole programme. For Michael Crichton’s ER (1994), he directed ‘Masquerade’ and ‘Truth & Consequences’ in 1998–1999. A hospital drama gives his interest in survival with limited options an everyday setting. The emergency need not threaten the entire planet to make a scene urgent.
We were gripped by ER because the ensemble made difficult work and fallible staff feel convincing. Its crowded storytelling occasionally wore us down, and that is the caution we bring to De Jarnatt’s fondness for crisis: keeping people under pressure can become tiring to watch. His aptitude for high-stakes ensemble work matters here, though two directing credits cannot account for everything we value in the series. The people struggling to do their jobs hold our attention when the crowded plotting threatens to lose it.
The X-Files (1993) offers a smaller foothold: he wrote ‘Fearful Symmetry’ in 1995. We recommend the series for David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, with a reservation about its fondness for secrecy, but that tells us little about this individual script. After television became his principal screen work, he turned towards short fiction, publishing Grace for Grace in 2020. His stories also put people in survival situations with few options left. For his directing, begin with Miracle Mile, where he also had responsibility for the writing.
Biography
Steve De Jarnatt is an American film and television director, screenwriter and short-story author. He grew up in Longview, Washington, and studied at The Evergreen State College and the American Film Institute.
De Jarnatt wrote and directed the apocalyptic thriller Miracle Mile (1988) and directed the science-fiction film Cherry 2000 (1987). He has directed episodes of series including ER and Lizzie McGuire, and wrote an episode of The X-Files. His short story 'Rubiaux Rising' was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2009, and his collection Grace for Grace was published in 2020.
