Ian Brennan

Whatever else is happening in an episode of Glee (2009), Sue Sylvester will at some point turn to another adult and say the cruellest true thing anyone present is thinking. Ian Brennan wrote most of those lines, and he has explained where they come from: "It’s just the mean things that pop into the back of your mind that you sometimes want to say but don’t. The difference is that Sue actually says it." That is his method. He writes the remark you thought better of and gives it to a character who did not.

He came to it as an actor, trained in Chicago, and it shows in the way his dialogue sits in the mouth: the lines are built to be said, not read. In 2005 he wrote a screenplay about a high-school show choir, drawn from his own and, by his account, without affection. Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk turned it into a series with him, and across six seasons he wrote many episodes, narrated, and directed now and then. Our view of Glee is that the first year was the sharpest, oddest comedy on American television and the five that followed forgot which parts of it were the good ones. The part we liked best was the part he wrote. We laughed at Sue more than we were comfortable with in that first season, because the lines were funnier than her targets deserved, and the programme let her have them anyway.

What followed took the mean streak into darker rooms. He co-wrote Cooties (2014) with Leigh Whannell, and co-created Scream Queens (2015) with Murphy and Falchuk, a comedy-horror that kept the insults and added the knives. He wrote for Murphy on The Politician, Ratched and Hollywood. Since 2022 he has been co-creator and showrunner of the Monster anthology, beginning with Jeffrey Dahmer (2022) and moving on to the Menendez brothers (2024), and he has directed some of the episodes himself. We have not reviewed them, so we will not judge them here. We can say that the reviews have been mixed, and that the choices these dramatisations make about real people have drawn comment.

That is the risk in the turn he has taken. A writer whose instrument is the joke nobody should make has moved to material where the joke is not available and the people are not invented. He has said he can hear characters talking. The test of Monster is what he does when what they said is on the record.

Watch the first season of Glee for what he can do with a line. Approach the later work knowing that the line is still his gift, and that it is a harder thing to use well when nobody is meant to laugh.