Jeff Davis builds monster stories for television and keeps them running: a procedural about human monsters that has gone nineteen seasons, then a werewolf serial that went six. The machinery is sound. What it produces is dependable rather than surprising.
Fi1m perspective
Every episode of Criminal Minds arrives at the same scene. A unit of FBI profilers has flown into a town that morning, studied what the killer left behind, and now stands in a police station describing him to the local officers until he stops being a pattern and becomes a person with an address. Jeff Davis wrote that scene into the series in 2005 and it has been played 364 times since, which tells you what he is good at and what does not much interest him.
He sold the script in 2003, from a pitch he has described himself: "When I pitched it to CBS, I said that all of the other crime shows out there are doing Agatha Christie. Let's do Hitchcock." He stayed as co-executive producer for the first season, wrote episodes, and then let the machine run without him. In 2011 he took the 1985 film Teen Wolf and remade it as a six-season serial, darker than the original and mixing horror, romance, jokes and scares for a teenage audience; he wrote 41 of its episodes, with Ian Stokes among his regular writers. He has been open about the shelf he works from, Stephen King, Thomas Harris, The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Lost Boys, and about the tone he wants, which he calls sexy, scary and surprising. In 2023 he went back to the werewolves twice, with Teen Wolf: The Movie and a new series, Wolf Pack, on which he also directed an episode.
The strengths and the weaknesses are the same thing seen from two sides. Davis can lay a long character arc through a format that resets every week, and he can keep a genre show on air for years, which very few writers manage once, let alone twice. The cost is repetition. We scored Criminal Minds a 60: grim, efficient and nearly identical from one week to the next. We watched a run of episodes back to back on a wet weekend and by the third we could have delivered the profile ourselves, and we noticed we felt calmed rather than frightened, which is an odd thing to feel about a programme built on murder. The calm comes from the structure, which promises that the explanation will arrive on schedule, and it always does. The later seasons of Teen Wolf drew the same complaint in another key: a mythology that stopped adding up and a growing habit of giving the fans what they had asked for.
He has now spent more than a decade in one werewolf world and shows no sign of leaving it. Start Criminal Minds anywhere; you can, and that is both the achievement and the problem.
Biography
Jeff Davis is an American writer and television producer. He was born on 13 June 1975 in Milford, Connecticut. He graduated from Vassar College with a degree in film and later earned a master's degree in screenwriting from the University of Southern California.
Davis sold a script to CBS in 2003 that became the series Criminal Minds, which premiered in 2005. He is credited as its creator and wrote episodes for the first season, during which he also served as co-executive producer.
He created the MTV series Teen Wolf (2011), writing 41 episodes across its run. His other credits include the 2023 film Teen Wolf: The Movie and the series Wolf Pack (2023).
