Will Matthews writes, with Jeffrey Addiss, about people nobody would pick to save the world: Gelfling, a king's daughter, pensioners. It works when the heroes are allowed to be funny and frightened at once, and stalls when the script hands them speeches instead.
Fi1m perspective
In The Boroughs (2026) a retirement community is the front line, and the joke is never that the people holding it are old. Denis O'Hare, Clarke Peters and Geena Davis are allowed to be afraid of dying and of the thing in the dark at the same time, and Alfred Molina and Alfre Woodard carry the adventure without anyone being asked to totter for a laugh. Matthews has called it a coming-of-age story: “It’s still coming-of-age. It’s just a different age.” That is the whole of the pitch, and it is a good one.
He came to writing from acting, and he and Jeffrey Addiss met at NYU and have been writing together for more than a decade. The partnership is the career. They made their name as co-creators and showrunners of The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (2019), a prequel that had to please people who knew the original and people who did not, and the Gelfling were the first of their unlikely heroes. Then came The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (2024), an animated prequel written with Arty Papageorgiou and Phoebe Gittins, and then The Boroughs, an original, with the Duffer Brothers producing. Two prequels and an original, all with monsters, all led by someone the story would not normally choose.
The pattern in our reviews is plain. Where the writing gives the characters things to do, it holds. Where it gives them things to say about hope, it sags. Héra in Rohirrim rides, argues and climbs a cliff after an eagle, and Gaia Wise plays her as someone working out how to lead while doing it; we liked her. But the script keeps handing her speeches, and the narration keeps telling us what the pictures have already shown, and somewhere in the siege we stopped listening to the words and sat waiting for the next thing to move in the snow. Four names on one screenplay may explain some of that. It does not excuse it.
The Boroughs is the better case for him, because the writers let fear of death sit next to the silliness and do not apologise for either. That is harder than it sounds; adventures with several tones tend to turn into a mishmash, and this one mostly does not, even when the monster mystery becomes a chore. The humour works because the programme does not think being seventy is the punchline, and the residents' duty to the people coming after them matters as much as their own survival.
What we do not yet know is what Matthews sounds like without Addiss, or without somebody else's world to arrange. The Boroughs is the first real answer and it is a promising one. If the next thing is another prequel, we would ask for fewer speeches about hope and more cliffs.
Biography
Will Matthews is an American writer, producer and occasional actor. He is best known for his long collaboration with Jeffrey Addiss, with whom he created and served as showrunner on the Netflix series The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (2019) and The Boroughs (2026).
Matthews and Addiss also wrote the screenplay and story for the animated film The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (2024) and the feature Life in a Year (2020). Matthews won a Primetime Emmy Award in 2020 for his work on The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance. An Amherst native, he has additional writing credits on short films and earlier television work.
