Tim Hunter made one feature in 1986 that people still talk about, then spent thirty years directing other people's television so well that nobody talks about him at all. That is a compliment, and it is also the limit.
Fi1m perspective
Tim Hunter's name comes up at the end of an episode you have just enjoyed, of a programme whose look you would know with the sound off, and it is a fair bet you did not notice the join. He has directed for Twin Peaks (1990), Homicide: Life on the Street (1993), Carnivàle (2003), Deadwood (2004), Mad Men (2007), Breaking Bad (2008) and Hannibal (2013), a list most directors would take in exchange for a career. Our reviews of all of them praise the look and name the cinematographers and the writers who run the shows. None of them mentions Hunter. That is not an oversight; it is the job.
It did not start that way. He wrote Over the Edge (1979), then directed Tex (1982), from the S.E. Hinton novel; Matt Dillon, his most frequent actor, made three films with him. River's Edge (1986) is the one people remember: teenagers, a murder, and the question of what anyone does about it. The reviews called his features downbeat, and from the late 1980s he moved to television and, apart from the occasional film, stayed. "It all starts with the script," he has said, and he has spent three decades working from other people's.
What he does well is hard to see. The strength that gets him hired is turning up to a programme with a settled style and a late script and delivering an hour that looks like the rest of it, at pace, without fuss. On Sons of Anarchy (2008) we noted the directors taking turns and every episode cut towards the same closing montage; Hunter's episodes are in that rota, and we could not tell you which. Rewatching the first season of Breaking Bad, whose finale is his, we were slightly unsettled to find we could not see where his hand ended and the programme's began. We had gone looking for him, the show had swallowed him whole, and it was better television for it.
The cost is that an episode director cannot rescue a programme that has lost its way. Glee (2009) forgot which parts of itself were good, Nip/Tuck (2003) lost its nerve and then its mind, and the third season of Hannibal slows nearly to a stop while everyone talks in aphorisms. Hunter was there for all three, and none of it is his to answer for, which also means none of the best of it is his to claim. Thirty years of this has left him with a filmography that says a great deal about the programmes and almost nothing about him.
If you want to find him, start with River's Edge, the one film where the choices were plainly his. Then watch Deadwood and Breaking Bad, which carry two of our highest scores, and try to spot the join. You will not, and he would probably take that as the compliment it is.
Biography
Tim Hunter is an American television and film director. Born on 15 June 1947 in Los Angeles, California, he is the son of screenwriter Ian McLellan Hunter and graduated from Harvard University in 1968.
In the early to mid-1980s he directed feature films including Tex (1982) and River's Edge (1986), the latter of which won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Picture. Since the late 1980s he has worked primarily in television, directing episodes of series including Twin Peaks (1990), Deadwood (2004), Mad Men (2007) and Breaking Bad (2008), as well as many others such as House, Dexter and American Horror Story.
