Brad Falchuk has spent the better part of twenty years in the writers' room beside Ryan Murphy, building series that begin as sharp genre pieces and grow louder as they go. Nip/Tuck shows both the gift and the habit; the gift comes first.
Fi1m perspective
Once or twice an episode of Nip/Tuck (2003), and never for long, Julian McMahon's Christian Troy stops selling. The teeth go away and you see how much he would give to be trusted the way Dylan Walsh's Sean is. Then the sale resumes. Falchuk was a writer in that room and went on to direct episodes of it, and the moment is the kind he has said he likes best: "I love it when characters surprise you, just like real people." When his shows are good, that is why.
He came to Nip/Tuck from science-fiction series, Mutant X (2001) and Earth: Final Conflict among them, and it is where he met Ryan Murphy and rose from staff writer to executive producer. The partnership has run for most of two decades. With Murphy and Ian Brennan he co-created Glee (2009), which he also wrote and directed; with Murphy, American Horror Story (2011), Scream Queens (2015) and Pose (2018); with Tim Minear, the 9-1-1 shows. The Brothers Sun (2024) is the first major series he has developed without Murphy.
It is hard to say where Falchuk ends and Murphy begins. Both names sit on the same credits, and the shows share a shape: a genre premise played straight for a season or two, then a rising volume of incident. Nip/Tuck wants a satire on the beauty trade dressed as a soap, and for two seasons it is one, because the writers decline to make either surgeon the villain. Walsh's Sean is so decent he is faintly tiring; McMahon's Christian brings in the money and the women and treats both the same way. We enjoyed those seasons more than a drama about liposuction had any right to expect, because the show let Sean's goodness be a little irritating rather than heroic. By the later years we were watching out of duty. The series had lost its nerve, and then its mind, and each twist arrived to cover for the one before.
That pattern is what early reviewers held against American Horror Story, spectacle and excess at the cost of a story that holds together, and we suspect it belongs to the partnership rather than to one man in it. It is also where Falchuk's own stated principle gets dropped. A character making a left turn because it is true to him is a surprise. A character making a left turn because the episode needs one is a plot.
Which makes The Brothers Sun the interesting test, and we have not reviewed it. Twenty years of credits shared with one collaborator tell you about the partnership more than about him. A season written under his own banner should show how much of the surprise was his.
Biography
Brad Falchuk is an American television writer, director and producer. He graduated from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in 1993 and received a master's degree in screenwriting from the AFI Conservatory.
He began his career writing for series such as Mutant X (2001) and Earth: Final Conflict (2001–02). He joined the writing staff of Nip/Tuck (2003) and directed episodes of the series. With Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, he co-created Glee (2009), on which he also wrote and directed. He has since co-created further series with Murphy, including American Horror Story (2011), Scream Queens (2015) and Pose (2018). He is married to actress Gwyneth Paltrow.
