Shakman is a television and theatre director whose work covers comedy, drama and genre with equal fluency. Wandavision is his most distinctive achievement: a grief story staged inside pastiches of American sitcoms, each episode shot with the format, lighting and even the aspect ratio of the era it imitates.
He acted as a child before moving behind the camera, and he has spent years running a theatre alongside his screen work. That background explains his comfort with performers and with staging, and it explains the precision of the sitcom recreations, which required studying multi camera production techniques that had largely fallen out of use.
Recurring subjects: performance as a way of avoiding pain, communities that agree not to notice something, and comedy used as the delivery mechanism for a much sadder idea. He directs comedy with a light hand and lets actors find the rhythm rather than imposing it. Formal experiments are always tied to character rather than pursued for their own sake.
His superhero series was the point at which serialised comic book television started treating format itself as a storytelling tool, and its reception opened the door for stranger and more formally adventurous entries in the same franchise. He has since been entrusted with a feature in that universe.
For viewers who like a formal gimmick that turns out to have a reason. Suited to anyone interested in television history, and to those who want a genre story that is really about mourning underneath the costume.
