Darin Morgan
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Darin Morgan is an American screenwriter best known for several offbeat, darkly humorous episodes of the television series The X-Files and Millennium. His teleplay for the X-Files episode "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose" won a 1996 Emmy for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Writing for a Drama Series. He is the younger brother of writer and director Glen Morgan.
Morgan was born in Syracuse, New York and attended the film program at Loyola Marymount University, where he co-wrote a six-minute short film that led to a three-picture deal with TriStar. Morgan subsequently wrote a number of unproduced screenplays and appeared in two small guest roles on The Commish and 21 Jump Street, where his brother Glen was a writer.
In 1994, Morgan was cast as the Flukeman, a mutated flukeworm the size of a human being, in a second-season episode of The X-Files. (Glen Morgan had joined the show year before as a writer and producer during the show's first season.) The role required Morgan to wear a cumbersome rubber suit for twenty hours at a stretch, an experience that he has since described as "terrible, just horrible." His appearance in "The Host," which originally aired on September 23, 1994, was followed by an offer for Morgan to write an episode of the series. This episode, "Blood," aired on September 30, 1994, and was Morgan's first story credit, although the teleplay was credited to Glen Morgan and James Wong.
Shortly thereafter, Morgan became a full-time staff writer for The X-Files, where he wrote his first solo episode, "Humbug" (originally aired on March 31, 1995). A quirky, funny, sometimes gruesome story about a series of murders in a colony of circus freaks, "Humbug" is usually considered a landmark episode in the history of The X-Files for broadening the tone and style of the famously dark series into funnier, less predictable directions. It was nominated for a 1996 Edgar award.
Morgan's next episode, "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose," originally aired on October 13, 1995. "Clyde Bruckman" remains a favorite of fans and critics alike, and was acclaimed for retaining the humorous spirit of "Humbug" while extending its story into darker, more poignant territory. Both Morgan and actor Peter Boyle, who played the depressed psychic Clyde Bruckman, won Emmy awards for this episode.
Morgan wrote two additional episodes of The X-Files, the absurdist cockroach invasion story "War of the Coprophages" (originally aired on January 5, 1996) and the famously convoluted "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" (originally aired on April 12, 1996), as well as contributing an uncredited rewrite to "Quagmire" (originally aired on May 3, 1996). He left the show after the third season, but joined the writing staff of Millennium, writing and directing two episodes with extremely layered plots and humorous dialogue: "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense" (which revived the character of author Jose Chung, played by Charles Nelson Reilly, and was originally aired on November 21, 1997) and "Somehow Satan Got Behind Me" (originally aired on May 1, 1998).
In addition to his work as a writer, Morgan contributed a substantial guest appearance to the X-Files episode "Small Potatoes" (originally aired on April 20, 1997), where he played Eddie Van Blundht, a self-described "loser" with the ability to shape-shift. He also had a small cameo in The One.
On August 11, 2004, it was announced that Morgan and Sam Hamm, the co-screenwriter of Batman and Batman Returns, were writing an untitled screenplay under development by DreamWorks SKG. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the story "concerns a marriage counselor, whose daughter is about to get married, who discovers that his future son-in-law is suffering from the delusion that he's a superhero."
To the surprise of many, Darin Morgan's name graced television screens (his first "behind the scenes" credit since May of 1998) on the second episode of former "X-Files" producer Frank Spotnitz's "Night Stalker" remake. Morgan was credited as consulting producer, though the show was canceled before any Morgan-written scripts were produced. The one script that Morgan wrote before the show was canceled was called "The M Word". It concerned a serial killer and a were-lizard, who may or may not be one and the same. It is available as a pdf on the second disc of the DVD set.
