Douglas Mackinnon is the director British showrunners call when the script is the star. On Line of Duty, Doctor Who and Good Omens he serves the writer rather than himself, which makes him reliable, well liked and almost impossible to spot.
Fi1m perspective
Watch an interview scene in Line of Duty and try to find the director. A suspect is walked into a glass-walled room, a recorder beeps, and Steve Arnott reads a document aloud for as long as it takes. The camera stays on faces. Nothing is hurried and nothing is underlined. Douglas Mackinnon directed five of those early episodes, and the point of them is that you cannot tell which five. He has built a career on that kind of invisibility, and he is good at it.
He came to it sideways: press photography, a Proclaimers video in 1987, and Home, a 1990 documentary series about Skye, where he was born. The 1990s went on The Bill, Soldier Soldier and London's Burning, the apprenticeship every British television director of his generation served. His first feature, The Flying Scotsman, arrived in 2006, and after that the writers found him. Steven Moffat gave him the first three episodes of Jekyll (2007). Doctor Who gave him eight episodes between 2008 and 2015, including the Sontaran two-parter and The Husbands of River Song, and made him the only director to have worked with Tennant, Smith and Capaldi. Jed Mercurio gave him Line of Duty (2012–2014), Moffat came back with Sherlock: The Abominable Bride (2016), and Neil Gaiman handed him all twelve episodes of Good Omens (2019–2023) as lead director and executive producer.
What he brings is a lack of vanity. He has said of Good Omens that "I see my role as an enabler", and that is the job as he understands it: work out what the writer wants, then get it on screen inside a television schedule. On Line of Duty that meant trusting Mercurio's paperwork to be frightening, and it was. We sat forward while a man read a date off a form, because the flat grey open-plan offices that Ruairí O'Brien and the series' other cinematographers gave it, strip lights and vertical blinds, made everything look ordinary and nothing feel safe. On Good Omens it meant Soho, the apocalypse and a large cast, handled on a television budget without the joins showing. Writers and actors keep coming back to him, which tells you what he is like to work with.
The cost is that there is no Mackinnon film, only Mercurio's and Moffat's and Gaiman's. Some reviews of Good Omens found its many plots playing as a string of sketches rather than one story, and a director more willing to impose himself might have pulled them tighter. Line of Duty is a series we rate, and we rate it as Mercurio's. If you want to see what Mackinnon does, watch the first two series and try to spot his episodes. You will not manage it, and he would take that as a compliment.
