Alfred Gough
Alfred Gough is a writer, born 1967.
Gough has spent most of his working life as one half of a partnership. With Miles Millar he writes and produces as a unit, and the unit has a recognizable habit: take a property with a fixed shape, find the adolescent angle inside it, and build a series out of the delay.
Smallville, developed for The WB in 2001, is the template. It is a Superman show that keeps the suit offscreen and gets years of drama out of a young man being told what he will become and not being allowed to become it yet. The feature work ran alongside it and is the more commercial half of the record: Shanghai Noon and its sequel, Spider-Man 2, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, Herbie: Fully Loaded, Hannah Montana: The Movie and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Those scripts are not among the credits listed here, which record the shows the pair created rather than the films they wrote or produced.
The later television is stranger than the Smallville reputation suggests. Into the Badlands ran a wuxia frame through a post-apocalyptic feudal America. The Shannara Chronicles pulled Terry Brooks onto MTV. Wednesday sent an Addams Family spin-off through Tim Burton and a boarding-school mystery structure, and it is the largest thing he has been attached to since the Superman years. For a writer whose name rarely appears in reviews, that is an unusually durable run of network and streaming ownership.
Movies (1)
TV (4)
Where to start with Alfred Gough
Smallville is the place to start, and the early seasons are where the delaying tactic still reads as a premise rather than a policy. A Superman story that refuses to deliver Superman should not work for as long as it does.
Wednesday is the same instinct at a faster tempo and is the better made of the two. If the gothic comedy is what brought you here, go straight to it. Into the Badlands is the outlier worth your evening: real fight choreography, a genuinely odd feudal setting, and nothing else on his list resembles it. The Shannara Chronicles is the weakest of the four, handsome and thin, and only rewards viewers already fond of the books. Look, Up in the Sky! The Amazing Story of Superman is a documentary he turns up in, and it earns its place only if the Superman half of his career is the half you came for.