Jason Woliner is a resourceful comedy director who works closely with performers, from ensemble sitcoms to partly unscripted encounters. We value his attention to character, but his documentary comedy raises harder questions about how fairly the participant is treated.
Fi1m perspective
In New Girl (2011), the comedy improves when Jess’s awkwardness stops being the whole joke and the friendships have room to develop. We warmed to those friendships because they gave us reasons to return beyond Zooey Deschanel’s good company. Woliner directed for the programme in 2012, and its character-led humour is a useful starting point for thinking about his work. Even when the romantic plotting becomes overworked, there is pleasure in spending time with this ensemble. We should be careful, though, about giving one episodic director the credit for what a whole programme gets right.
The stranger comedy was there earlier. He directed the sketches in Human Giant (2007–2008) without performing in them, then directed and ran the surreal action comedy Eagleheart (2011). Alongside that work came three episodes of Parks and Recreation (2009–2010), another ensemble sitcom. His collaborators include Brett Gelman and Aziz Ansari, and close work with performers carries through his scripted and partly unscripted projects.
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (2020) gives that collaborative approach a less predictable setting, mixing hidden-camera encounters with improvisation. Handling both within a feature is a substantial directing skill: the encounters cannot be entirely settled in a script. We value his ability to work with that uncertainty, though the ethical questions become harder when a real participant is the central attraction. With Paul T. Goldman (2023), his hybrid documentary-comedy series, the filmmaker’s power over his subject becomes a particular concern.
The difficulty there is the uncertain balance between empathy and exploitation. A participant’s self-presentation can be revealing, but that does not settle how fairly the programme treats them. Woliner’s own formulation is blunt: “The villain of a documentary is the filmmaker.” We take that as a reason to watch his decisions closely, rather than permission to excuse them. Start with New Girl for company; approach Paul T. Goldman with more caution about whom the programme asks us to laugh at.
Biography
Jason Woliner (born 1 June 1980) is an American director, writer and former child actor. He is the non-performing member of the comedy group Human Giant and directed the bulk of the group's output, including its MTV sketch series that ran for two seasons.
Woliner has directed episodes of television series including Parks and Recreation (2009), New Girl (2011), The Last Man on Earth (2015), What We Do in the Shadows (2019) and Nathan for You. He directed the feature film Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (2020), for which he shared a Golden Globe award.
