Jeffrey Blitz

Steve Carell's boss in The Office (2005) is exhausting, but his neediness keeps us watching. We laughed because Carell makes that need for approval so painfully apparent. Jeffrey Blitz's recurring interest in awkward people under pressure fits this comedy well. We rate him as a director who can make that discomfort funny without losing sympathy for the person, though his fondness for quirks sometimes gets in the way.

He began with Spellbound (2002), following eight competitors in the National Spelling Bee, and moved into fiction with Rocket Science (2007). Competition gives him a clear reason to watch people struggle, and the appeal lies in the characters as much as the contest. Television became a substantial part of his work: he directed eleven episodes of The Office between 2006 and 2013, then directed, wrote and co-showran Review (2014–2017). His collaborators include actor and writer Andy Daly and editor Yana Gorskaya.

The Office gives us the clearest reason to recommend him. ‘Stress Relief’ (2009) is a notable example of his skill with comic set pieces, although a series made by many people cannot be credited to one director. Our affection for the programme rests on its cast, who make the workplace worth returning to despite the borrowed beginnings and occasional overplaying. The overplaying matters: it draws attention away from the neediness that makes Carell's boss worth tolerating.

The reservation about Rocket Science is sharper: its stylistic tics can make the people less believable. Table 19 (2017) returns to an ensemble of misfit wedding guests, but the uneven tone and conventional handling suggest that gathering outsiders together is not enough. Blitz works best when the awkwardness tells us something recognisable about a person, rather than supplying another reason to call them eccentric. Start with The Office, if an exhausting boss is something we can persuade you to spend an evening with.