Robert Duncan McNeill is the actor turned director you hire to keep a long-running series steady for five seasons, and on Chuck he did. Steadiness is also the limit: the action is clean, the tone never wobbles and nobody on screen looks in any danger.
Fi1m perspective
Watch an action scene from Chuck and you will always know where everyone is. The geography is clear, the cuts land where they should and the joke arrives on time. What is missing is any sense that a bullet might find someone. When we reviewed the series we said Robert Duncan McNeill shot its action cleanly and without much feeling that anyone could be hurt, and that sentence describes most of what he has done since.
He arrived at directing by the usual television route, which is acting. He spent seven seasons as Tom Paris on Star Trek: Voyager (1995–2001) and directed four episodes while he was there. When the show ended he stopped acting and did not go back, taking single episodes of Dawson's Creek, Supernatural and Desperate Housewives until Chuck (2007) gave him somewhere to stay. He directed 21 episodes of it across five seasons, produced it from the start and finished as executive producer. Since then he has done the same job on The Orville (2017) and on Resident Alien (2021), where he also wrote.
The job is producer-director, and McNeill is a good case for it. He has said he looks at a series "like it’s one long story", and in practice that means someone who stays for years, learns what the show is and keeps each episode inside it. On Chuck the spy plot and the electronics-shop comedy shared a screen for five seasons without either crushing the other, which is harder than it looks. Zachary Levi, Yvonne Strahovski and Adam Baldwin were the reason we stayed, and a director who spent years as an actor knows to keep out of their way.
It is also where the reservations start. A show run as one long story can get good at not changing, and Chuck did. The villains blurred, the missions repeated, and the romance was held back with growing ingenuity and shrinking conviction. By the third season we were cross with a series we had come to like, because it was stalling on purpose and knew we could tell, and a director who thinks in seasons owns that as much as the writers do.
Nobody appears to have a bad word to say about him, and we could not find one. We also could not name an episode of his that frightened us or caught us out. If you want a long-running series kept upright and pleasant for a hundred hours, he is your man; if you want one that occasionally draws blood, look elsewhere.
Biography
Robert Duncan McNeill is an American television director and producer. Born on 9 November 1964 in Raleigh, North Carolina, he trained at the Juilliard School and began his career as an actor before moving into directing.
He directed episodes of Star Trek: Voyager and later served as producer and director on Chuck (2007–2012), where he directed 21 episodes and held various producing roles. His other directing credits include episodes of Supernatural (2005), Desperate Housewives (2004), The Mentalist (2008), White Collar (2009), Suits (2011), The Orville (2017), The Resident (2018) and The Gifted (2017).
