Bruno Heller
Bruno Heller is a writer, born 1960.
Heller writes about charisma and the institutions that cannot handle it. Born in London in 1960, he is the son of the screenwriter Lukas Heller and the brother of the novelist Zoe Heller, so the trade was already in the house, and his own credits are few but heavy: four series, all of them his own creation.
Rome, for HBO in 2005, made his name. It tells the late Republic from the bottom of the ladder as much as the top, and treats politics as a family business conducted with knives. It is expensive, blunt and considerably less reverent than most historical drama, and its influence on prestige television is easy to trace.
The Mentalist, from 2008, is the commercial one, a network procedural built on a man who is not psychic pretending that he is, and it ran and ran because Heller understood that an audience will accept any amount of formula if the lead is enjoyable company.
Then came the Batman years. Gotham, from 2014, is a police series set inside a comic-book city, and Pennyworth, which he co-created, takes the butler and hands him a 1960s London spy story instead. Both are odder than the assignment required, which may be the most consistent thing about him.
TV (4)
Where to start with Bruno Heller
Rome is the one to watch, and it holds up better than almost anything else from that era of television. Start there for the writing: the dialogue is coarse, funny and completely unimpressed by the people it is about, and the two soldiers at the centre of it are the best thing Heller has put on screen.
The Mentalist is the opposite proposition, comfort viewing with a serial-killer spine, and it is well constructed if you take it as a puzzle-of-the-week show rather than the long mystery it advertises itself as.
Gotham suits anyone who wants their Batman city played straight-faced and hysterical at the same time, and it gets stranger every season, which is a recommendation. Pennyworth: The Origin of Batman's Butler is the one nobody watched and the one with the most style.
Four shows, one preoccupation: what a system does with someone it cannot control.