Josh Schwartz writes television about young people with more money or more secrets than sense, sets it to the right song and refuses to look down on anyone. It is warm, quick and quotable, and it leans on its casts to cover writing that repeats itself.
Fi1m perspective
A Josh Schwartz scene tends to end on a song. Someone young and better looking than the situation deserves stands in a doorway, the talking stops, and a track you have not heard yet but will hear everywhere by Christmas takes over. He has done this since The O.C. in 2003, and it is the easiest of his habits to mock and the one that shows what he is up to. The song carries the feeling so the characters can stay quick and dry.
He was selling scripts while still at film school in the late 1990s, and he was running The O.C. at 26, which is young for a network showrunner and shows in the best and worst of it. In 2007 he had two new series on the air at once: Gossip Girl, on Manhattan money, with his long-standing partner Stephanie Savage, and Chuck, with Chris Fedak. Around 2010 he and Savage set up a production company, and since then his name has sat on Hart of Dixie, Dynasty, Runaways (2017), Nancy Drew and Looking for Alaska (2019), on which he also directed an episode. He has work lined up into 2026.
Chuck is the one we have reviewed, and it is a fair sample. Chuck Bartowski mends computers at a Buy More in Burbank for eleven dollars an hour, and one email puts every secret the American government owns into his head. That is the whole idea, and the show spends five seasons and 91 episodes stretching it. We enjoyed it more than the scripts earned, and we know why: Zachary Levi, Yvonne Strahovski and Adam Baldwin make a lazy episode feel like an evening with people we liked, and the writing counts on that. By the third season the formula has worn thin. The charm has not, and we stayed.
The complaints about Schwartz have been consistent across twenty years, and they are ours too. The plots move fast and then move the same way again; his worlds are glossy and do not stretch far outside the well-off. His answer, more or less, is that he does not like shows that feel as if they are judging their characters. That is his best quality and his limit in one sentence. He is kind to the rich kids and to the man behind the counter, and kindness stops him asking either of them a hard question.
Looking for Alaska let him direct, and it is the closest he has come to sitting still. Whether he can do that for a whole series is the open question. Until we know, start with Chuck, stop around the point in the third season where the writers start repeating themselves, and keep the soundtrack.
Biography
Josh Schwartz is an American screenwriter and television producer. He created the Fox series The O.C. (2003–2007) at the age of 26, becoming one of the youngest people to create and run a network series. He attended the University of Southern California film school.
Schwartz co-created the NBC action-comedy series Chuck (2007–2012) with Chris Fedak, serving as writer and executive producer. He also developed Gossip Girl (2007–2012) for The CW and has executive produced or written for series including Hart of Dixie (2011–2015), Marvel's Runaways (2017–2019) and the Dynasty reboot (2017–2022).
