Chris Chibnall - Blog Posts

The Irony of Chris Chibnall for me is not the fact that he is my favorite television/film writer. A lot of television and film writers are people you can fall in love with. It’s the same with books. Reading specific authors I never tire of Tolkien or Rowling or CS Lewis. I love Gene Roddenberry (of the original Star Trek franchise) and his creativity mixing science with a flair of myth and legend and the wonderings of the yesterday and how the past fit in with the Enterprise’s crew and their respective futures as such.

But Chris Chibnall is just plainly ironic for me.

I’ve only ever really watched things he’s written if they’re tied up in my David Tennant obsession (but really, is that really that impossible?) but starting off I honestly had no idea who Chibnall was. I started off in the Doctor Who franchise and lo and behold my favorite Tenth Doctor episode of Series 3 was ‘42′. I was impressed by the way the writer had written the Doctor so vulnerable and frightened and in such a spot that it fell to Martha, his companion, to do the saving.  It was a surprising and refreshing change from the normally stoic and triumphant Doctor.

Then I watched ‘United’ on Netflix shortly after I’d finished with David’s seasons of DW. United is one of two of my absolute favorite films ever written (and my favorite DT project to date). I love history but I fell in love with United because of the emotions felt throughout it all. It’s a quiet believable movie with terrific acting but most of all believable writing. Chibnall, I feel, makes you love these young boys who nearly all lose their lives in the plane crash that nearly cripples Manchester United. It’s writing perfection in my opinion.

Then I came over to Broadchurch and holy crap I was blown away within fifteen minutes of the first episode. Everything about the show drew me in: the characters, the scenery, the acting, the MUSIC, and of course the writing. Chibnall is able to blend humor and darkness, secular and religious, discovery and heartbreak, and weave them all together to make devastating beauty.

It was only after I had watched all of Broadchurch and had watched United again that I realized all that I had actually seen had been written by the exact same man. The writer I had been so impressed with since the beginning even though I would never have guessed he had written my favorite Tenth Doctor DW episode, favorite movie, and favorite tv show was shown to have written them all after all.

Chris Chibnall impresses me as a writer because he seems to understand humanity and how we work as a species. He can write pain and love and loss and make characters that stand out and stay with us. And of course that’s helped along by the wonderful and talented actors and actresses who play those characters, but it was Chibnall who created/built on them to begin with, and that’s why I love him so much.

It just still makes me laugh at the irony that I would have already loved so many of the projects he had done without ever realizing that he was the one who wrote them.