Brian Gatewood writes, with Alessandro Tanaka, high-concept comedies with a crime story underneath: a fake Romanian cop show, a con told backwards, a sushi chef in a city run by cooks. The premises are what we remember; the endings, so far, less so.
Fi1m perspective
A quiet sushi master in a Los Angeles where food is the only thing anyone cares about, and the chefs hold the power that gangsters used to hold. Two kitchens run the town and both want him. He refuses them. That is the whole of Get Jiro (2026), and it tells you most of what Brian Gatewood does: find a premise that fits in one sentence, tilt it towards the absurd, and put a crime story under it. The idea here belongs to Anthony Bourdain, from the graphic novel he wrote with Joel Rose, but Gatewood and his writing partner Alessandro Tanaka have kept its bones and added a great deal of blood.
The two met in a screenwriting class at Columbia and have written together since. Their first produced feature was The Sitter (2011), a studio comedy, and they created Animal Practice (2012) and wrote on Dice and Superstore. The shape of the work settled with Comrade Detective (2017), directed by Rhys Thomas, which takes a fictional 1980s Romanian cop show and re-dubs it with American voices. Then came Sharper (2023), a con-artist film told in chapters that run backwards, each one changing what the one before it meant. Gatewood has said the film began with Tanaka telling him he wanted to do a con film in reverse, and that he understood at once.
What works is the hook, and the speed. Get Jiro is five short episodes, bloody and fast, and it finishes before the joke wears out. We laughed at it more than we expected to, and it was the food that did it: the series is at its sharpest when it treats a kitchen as a matter of life and death and means both words. Bourdain's premise was good, and Gatewood and Tanaka have the sense not to explain it.
What does not work, so far, is the finishing. Our complaint about Get Jiro was that it is over before it decides what it is, and that is partly the price of five episodes and partly a habit. The reviews of Sharper found the third act uneven and the backwards trick repeating itself; the complaints about Get Jiro elsewhere were that the food got crowded out by revenge plotting and that nobody around Jiro was much of a person. Put those together and the note is the same: the device is stronger than the people inside it, and when the device has done its work there is not enough left to hold up the last act.
There are other projects in development, Positano and Just Dance among them, and we know nothing about them beyond the titles. Start with Get Jiro. It is short, it is funny, and it shows both halves of the habit in a single evening.
Biography
Brian Gatewood is a writer and producer. His screenwriting credits include the feature films The Sitter (2011) and Sharper (2023). He has also written episodes of the television series Superstore (2018–2019).
Gatewood created the animated series Comrade Detective (2017) and Animal Practice (2012–2013). He is the co-creator, with Alessandro Tanaka, of the forthcoming Adult Swim animated series Get Jiro! (2026), adapted from the graphic novels by Anthony Bourdain and Joel Rose. He has additionally served as a producer or executive producer on several of these projects.
