Michael Koman

Somewhere in nearly every episode of Nathan for You (2013) a shopkeeper hears the plan, opens his mouth to answer and finds nothing there. The camera stays on him two seconds longer than television usually allows. Nobody wrote that silence, but somebody decided it was the joke and that the edit should hold for it, and that decision is Michael Koman's trade. He is a comedy writer whose best-known work contains, by his own account, very few jokes.

He learnt the other kind first. Seven years on Late Night with Conan O'Brien (2001 to 2008) produced recurring bits such as the Walker, Texas Ranger Lever, the sort of thing that has to land every night. He was head writer on Important Things with Demetri Martin, then made Eagleheart (2011) with Andrew Weinberg and Jason Woliner, a send-up of the action procedural we have not reviewed and will not pretend to judge. Then came Nathan for You, four seasons with Nathan Fielder, and after it writing on Saturday Night Live, How To with John Wilson (2020) and Girls5eva, and now The Paper (2025) with Greg Daniels.

The pattern across all of it is formats. Koman takes a kind of television that already exists, the business makeover, the cop show, the mockumentary, and copies its surface: the clean interview against the shelves, the graphic that explains the plan, the soft corporate guitar. The comedy comes from putting a real person inside the copy and waiting. He has said of Nathan for You that once the pilot was made, "You don’t have to actually write real jokes," and the series bears that out; the pilot had more scripted gags, and they were pared away as the show found that a proprietor's long pause did the work better. We laughed at those pauses more than at any written line in the series, and then felt slightly uneasy, because the man on screen was not acting.

The difficulty in writing about him is the one that attends any writer of unscripted comedy: the face on screen gets the credit and the co-creator gets a "with". We rated Nathan for You highly and cannot divide that verdict between Fielder and Koman, and we suspect neither can they. What we can say is that the shows he has been near share a temperature, patient, deadpan, unwilling to cut early, and that this is unlikely to be coincidence. The first season, by our reckoning, was patchy; the method took time to trust itself.

The Paper puts him in a newsroom, in a mockumentary form that has been worn smooth over twenty years, alongside Daniels, who did a good deal of the wearing. Whether the silences survive a fully scripted workplace is the question. Koman has spent a career showing that the funniest line is often the one nobody says. A newspaper office is full of people who talk for a living.