Dominic Mitchell finds warmth and awkward humour in the undead’s return to ordinary life. We value his patience with people, though his writing can explain what the actors have already made clear.
Fi1m perspective
The undead in In the Flesh (2013) have to reconnect with people who remain frightened or resentful, and Dominic Mitchell gives that effort proper attention. Accepting somebody in principle can still leave plenty of awkwardness when they return home. We were moved by the series because it lets those returning characters struggle with ordinary contact, rather than treating their distress as a pause before the next fright. Mitchell is worth watching for that patience, though he can be less patient about letting us reach a conclusion without help.
His theatre work includes the darkly comic Potentials (2009), but In the Flesh was his television breakthrough. Its first series has just three episodes, a tight space for a story about rehabilitation, guilt and a community learning to live with the undead. The second series, in 2014, expanded to six episodes and developed the mythology while preserving the tone. That combination of domestic concerns and a carefully worked-out fictional world gives him plenty to write about.
That attention to people can also make the writing over-insistent. In In the Flesh, dialogue sometimes explains feelings the performances have already made clear, and the short first series takes on more subjects than it can develop. We want Mitchell to leave the actors alone at those moments, because their discomfort is persuasive without further instruction. His willingness to let a zombie story be sad is a strength; his need to ensure that every difficult subject gets discussed can hurry the storytelling.
On Westworld (2016), he shared story credit with Lisa Joy for the first-series episode Contrapasso and served as supervising producer on five episodes. We found the programme exact and unsettling at first, then increasingly distracted by its puzzles. Those later failings should not be assigned to a writer whose credited contribution belongs to the first series, nor should its early strengths all be claimed for him. For a zombie story prepared to spend time on the difficult business of coming home, start with In the Flesh.
Biography
Dominic Mitchell is an English playwright and screenwriter. He studied film and video at the Surrey Institute of Art & Design in Farnham and began his career writing for the stage, winning the Papatango New Playwriting Prize in 2009 for his play Potentials.
Mitchell created and wrote the BBC Three series In the Flesh (2013–2014), for which he received BAFTA Television Craft and Television Awards in 2014. He later wrote the fifth episode of the first season of HBO's Westworld (2016) and served as a supervising producer on the series.
