Angela Robinson makes space for queer relationships inside genre stories and pays close attention to performers. We like those priorities, though Wednesday gives us more pleasure through its cast than through its mystery.
Fi1m perspective
Spies and a lesbian romance share the screen in D.E.B.S. (2004), the feature Robinson wrote and directed from her own short. The combination is a useful introduction to her work: she repeatedly centres queer characters in stories that use camp, comedy or genre conventions. We like her willingness to give the romance that space. It provides a more specific reason to seek her out than the variety of her credits.
Herbie: Fully Loaded (2005) took her into studio filmmaking, before extensive television work on programmes including The L Word, True Blood and Hung. She returned to features as writer-director of Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (2017), a biographical drama about Wonder Woman’s creators and their relationship. The move from spy comedy to biographical drama kept her interest in queer relationships central. Her television work requires a different assessment: a programme’s strengths and weaknesses cannot all be credited to one of its episodic directors.
In Wednesday (2022), Jenna Ortega finds real comedy in her heroine’s severity. We laughed at that severity, and the cast’s warmth and mischief made the less distinctive school mystery worth staying with. Robinson’s contribution came with two episodes of the second series (2025), so our enthusiasm for the programme should not be mistaken for a judgement of her episodes alone. Its dependence on performance does, however, suit her attention to actors’ physicality, voices and emotional detail.
Her Wednesday work reunited her with the showrunners from Herbie: Fully Loaded, Alfred Gough and Miles Millar. Robinson’s attention to performance is particularly useful in supernatural material, where actors must make unlikely situations convincing without explaining everything aloud. That is a sound reason to be interested in her direction, although it does not settle our reservation about this particular programme’s plotting. Start with Wednesday for Ortega; try D.E.B.S. for a clearer sense of Robinson’s own comic and romantic interests.
Biography
Angela Robinson is an American film and television director, screenwriter and producer. She was born on 14 February 1971 and graduated from Brown University and New York University.
Robinson is known for directing the feature films D.E.B.S. (2004) and Herbie: Fully Loaded (2005), as well as Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (2017). Her television credits include directing episodes of The L Word, True Blood and two episodes of the Netflix series Wednesday (2025). She received the Fusion Achievement Award from Outfest Fusion LGBTQ People of Color Film Festival in 2013.
