Brad Falchuk, the Glee Co-Creator Who Now Tapes Last Words for Netflix

Brad Falchuk

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	March 1, 1971 Newton, Massachusetts, United States
Occupation	Television writer, director and producer
Awards	2 Emmy (shared) · AFI (shared) · Writers Guild of America West Valentine Davies

There are two people in the room when Brad Falchuk works on Famous Last Words: him and his guest. The cameras run by remote control, the crew cannot hear a word, and the guest has agreed that Netflix will release the conversation only after their death. Near the end, Falchuk stands up and walks out, so the final minutes belong to the subject alone. It is an unlikely place to find the co-creator of Glee, a writer whose name has sat beside Ryan Murphy‘s on some of the loudest television in America, and who has spent most of that time being described as somebody else’s partner.

The habit of standing slightly apart started early. Falchuk was born in Massachusetts into a Jewish family with a public streak: his mother, Nancy Falchuk, would later serve as national president of Hadassah, and his brother Evan ran for governor of Massachusetts as an independent. At school he wore a tie every day. He has said he was always trying to look smart because he didn’t feel smart. The reason, undiagnosed for years, was dyslexia.

He graduated from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in 1993, at 22, and took a master’s degree in screenwriting at the AFI Conservatory in Los Angeles. While still a student there, in 1997, he co-founded Young Storytellers with Mikkel Bondesen and Andrew Barrett, an arts-education nonprofit set up after the Los Angeles Unified School District cut funding for creative programs. The Writers Guild of America West gave him its Valentine Davies Award for that work in 2020.

The first jobs were genre scripts for syndicated television: Mutant X, Earth: Final Conflict, Veritas: The Quest. The break came with Nip/Tuck, the FX plastic-surgery drama, which hired him for its first season in 2003. There he wrote, later directed episodes, and found the collaborator who would shape the next twenty years: the show’s creator, Ryan Murphy. Their first joint pilot, Pretty/Handsome, about a transgender gynecologist, was bought by FX in 2008 and never became a series.

What they made next was the opposite of a surgical melodrama. With Ian Brennan, who had written a screenplay about high-school show choirs, they pitched Fox a one-hour comedy about a glee club. Glee premiered in 2009 and ran for six seasons, until March 2015. Falchuk wrote and directed episodes, and the American Film Institute named it TV program of the year in 2010 and again in 2011. One storyline came from his own body: in 2008 he had needed emergency spinal surgery, and the experience fed into the episode “Wheels”.

Then came the dark turn. In 2011 Murphy and Falchuk launched American Horror Story on FX, built on a format the network’s chief, John Landgraf, would describe as an anthological series of miniseries with a repertory cast. Falchuk said the goal was to scare people and leave them “a little bit off balance”. The anthology grew into a franchise, American Story, which took in American Crime Story, where he served as an executive producer. The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story won the Emmy for outstanding limited series in 2016, and the Gianni Versace season repeated the win in 2018, with Falchuk among the credited producers.

The rest of the decade reads like a production schedule. Scream Queens for Fox, co-created with Murphy and Brennan, several episodes of which he directed. 9-1-1, created with Murphy and Tim Minear, a first-responder procedural that moved from Fox to ABC and is still on the air. Pose, the ballroom drama, which brought him Emmy nominations for best drama series and for writing its finale. The Politician, for Netflix.

This is where the public picture tilts. In most coverage of those shows the authorship is Murphy’s, and Falchuk appears in the credits and the trade announcements but rarely in the arguments critics have about the work. The tabloids settled on a different frame after he married Gwyneth Paltrow, whom he had met on the Glee set. When he signed a four-year overall deal with Netflix in 2019 through his own company, Brad Falchuk Teley-Vision, it became the first real test of what he would build on his own. The answer was The Brothers Sun, an action family drama he created with Byron Wu and ran himself, with Michelle Yeoh as the matriarch of a Taipei crime family hiding in Los Angeles. It drew mostly warm reviews when it premiered in January 2024. Netflix cancelled it two months later.

Famous Last Words is the project that finally carries his face. Netflix acquired the format, the Danish TV2 series Det sidste ord, in 2024, and Falchuk hosts and produces it with Bondesen, his co-founder at Young Storytellers. Each episode is cut from roughly four hours of conversation to one; the complete recordings are kept at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. Jane Goodall’s episode was released in October 2025, within days of her death. Eric Dane recorded his in November 2025 while living with ALS; he died in February 2026 and his interview reached Netflix the next day. Gloria Steinem’s followed on September 3, 2026, a day after she died at 92.

The reviews have been more about him than he might like. The New York Post found him reverent but a bit dry in the Goodall episode, and a critic at the Brown Daily Herald objected to his presence in the frame. Stuart Heritage of The Guardian called the Dane episode undeniably powerful and predicted that, a couple of decades from now, the series would be one of the most fascinating resources we have. Both reactions point at the same thing. For the first time in his career, the work cannot be separated from the man asking the questions.

His private life is public mostly because of whom he married. His first marriage, to the television producer Suzanne Bukinik, began in 2002; they have two children and filed for divorce in 2013. He and Paltrow went public in 2015 and married in the Hamptons in September 2018. They practise Transcendental Meditation together.

The factory has not slowed down. The thirteenth season of American Horror Story premiered on FX on September 24, 2026, and 9-1-1 returns for a tenth season on ABC on October 15, the same night as the second season of its spin-off 9-1-1: Nashville, on which he is an executive producer. Ahead is Magic 8 Ball, a supernatural drama built on the Mattel toy, which Falchuk is writing and M. Night Shyamalan will direct, the two of them running it together; no network or date has been announced. The next episode of Famous Last Words has no date either, by design. It will arrive when someone he has already interviewed is gone.

Featured Series

Tags: Ryan Murphy, American Horror Story, showrunners, Glee, Gwyneth Paltrow, Brad Falchuk, television creators

Related People

Featured Series

Related People

Discussion