Steven Moffat
Steven Moffat is a writer, born 1961.
Steven Moffat writes plots the way engineers build bridges, and for a stretch he was the best in British television at it. Born in Paisley in 1961, he started in children's drama with Press Gang in 1989, a series about a school newspaper that was far harder and sadder than its slot implied, then made his name in comedy with Coupling in 2000, a sitcom structured like a farce and fascinated by the mechanics of how a joke is assembled.
Then Doctor Who. He wrote for the 2005 revival before taking it over as showrunner and head writer from 2010 to 2017, and won Hugo Awards for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, along the way. What he brought was a specific pleasure: the episode as a trap, a rule established in the first minute that pays off in the last, a monster defined by one behavioural gimmick you cannot unlearn. In the same years he co-created Sherlock, which ran from 2010 to 2017 and rebuilt Conan Doyle as a puzzle box with on-screen graphics.
The criticism is fair and worth stating plainly. The same construction repeats; mysteries get built whose answers cannot possibly match the setup; his women are too often written as riddles for the hero rather than as people. When the trick lands it is thrilling, and when it does not the machinery is visible from the back row. He was appointed OBE in the 2015 Birthday Honours for services to drama, and the later work, the Dracula he made with Mark Gatiss, the BBC thriller Inside Man, an adaptation of The Time Traveler's Wife, keeps testing the same instincts on unfamiliar material.
Movies (1)
TV (9)
Books (1)
Where to start with Steven Moffat
The fastest way in is Sherlock. Its first series is the purest example of the Moffat method, three feature-length puzzles that respect how quickly an audience thinks, and what happens to the show later is itself instructive about a trick that has to keep escalating.
His Doctor Who years are the main body of the work and are not among the credits listed here, but Day of the Doctor is: his own novelisation of the fiftieth-anniversary special, stranger and more formally playful than the episode, which is what he does when nobody can stop him.
Before all that, Press Gang is the surprise, a children's series from 1989 with better dialogue than most adult drama of its decade. Coupling is the comedy, dated in patches and structurally brilliant in others. Of the late work, Dracula is the most enjoyable and the most uneven, Inside Man is the nastiest, and The Time Traveler's Wife is the one that got away from him.