Terry Matalas, the showrunner Hollywood calls to finish its stories

Terry Matalas

Photo: Tim Blackmon for Galaxy Con / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 11, 1975 New Jersey, United States
Occupation	Television writer, showrunner and director
Awards	Saturn Award

The pitch that turned Terry Matalas into a showrunner was his own, and it reached the screen under somebody else’s title. The company that owned Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys liked his time-travel pilot Splinter, and Matalas proposed the simplest fix he could think of: swap his characters’ names for theirs. Ever since, the American writer has been the person studios call when a story needs an ending. He closed Jean-Luc Picard’s story for Paramount+, and he is now closing the Marvel trilogy that began with WandaVision. What his career has yet to answer is whether the man who finishes other people’s sagas will be allowed to start one of his own.

Matalas grew up near Raritan, New Jersey, on a diet of science fiction he describes without apology: E.T. on opening day, far too young for it, Back to the Future as his favourite film, Star Trek: The Next Generation as his favourite show. “I consumed way too much,” he told IndieWire. At Emerson College in Boston he met Travis Fickett, the co-writer on much of his early work.

The Paramount lot is where Matalas, born on December 11, 1975, got his real schooling. As an intern and then a production assistant on Star Trek: Voyager, he carried scripts to actors, among them Jeri Ryan, who joined that series at about the same time he did; on the Star Trek features he drove Patrick Stewart around on a golf cart. He moved up to write two stories for Star Trek: Enterprise, a job he has compared to “a free admission to Harvard,” then wrote for Fox’s dinosaur drama Terra Nova and two seasons of The CW’s Nikita.

Splinter, the spec he and Fickett wrote in 2013, landed at Atlas Entertainment, which had produced Gilliam’s 1995 film and was already planning a series. SyFy ordered it, and 12 Monkeys ran four seasons, from 2015 to 2018, with Matalas as showrunner. Never a ratings hit, it built a loyal audience by keeping its time travel coherent, under a rule he laid down in the writers’ room: “If you have to draw a timeline on a dry erase board then we can’t use it.” He cast Christopher Lloyd in the third season and directed four episodes. The finale is still cited as one of the more satisfying endings in recent television. “To this day it’s still my baby,” he says.

Other people’s shows followed: Blood Drive and Nightflyers for SyFy, then the fourth season of the CBS reboot of MacGyver, which he ran. Two originals went nowhere: Apex, a drama he sold to CBS, and The Last American Vampire, stranded when Quibi shut down.

Star Trek: Picard changed his standing. Matalas arrived for the second season as co-showrunner with Akiva Goldsman, a period in which, by his own account, he was “still learning the ropes of what New Star Trek meant.” Halfway through that production he moved across to run the third season alone. He brought composer Stephen Barton and several 12 Monkeys actors with him, and pitched Stewart and the rest of the Next Generation cast the farewell he felt Star Trek: Nemesis had denied them. Amanda Plummer played the villain, Vadic, and Matalas directed the last two episodes himself. Released between February and April 2023, the season scored 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, entered Nielsen’s streaming top ten three times and earned him a Writers Guild nomination.

The triumph came with an argument attached. Several reviewers called the season fan service, a parade of callbacks to a series that had ended almost three decades earlier, while others credited the writers with never milking it purely for nostalgia. Both camps were describing the same talent: Matalas knows, with unusual precision, what an audience already loves and how to hand it back. He floated Star Trek: Legacy as a follow-up; Paramount never ordered it. Twice now his clearest proof of ability has rested on characters someone else created, while the ideas carrying only his name have stalled.

Kevin Feige was watching. The Marvel Studios president has said the season made him think, “This is incredible. I don’t know how this exists. Let me find the person who made this.” Matalas tells it as a friendship that grew out of a shared love of Star Trek, adding that he made clear he was “desperate to be a part of” Marvel. By May 2024 he was redeveloping a Vision series that Jac Schaeffer, the creator of WandaVision, had originally been set to lead. Schaeffer, he told TheWrap, said she did not want “any creative conversations” with him and left him a blank canvas.

VisionQuest premiered on Disney+ on October 13, 2026, with two episodes, as the final chapter of the trilogy that continued with Agatha All Along. Paul Bettany returns as Vision, posing as a human in an Edinburgh pub; James Spader is back as Ultron, and Ruaridh Mollica plays Tommy, the teenager who may be Vision’s son. Matalas built it as a story about three generations of one machine family and cast familiar faces from 12 Monkeys, Todd Stashwick as the bounty hunter Paladin and Emily Hampshire as the AI E.D.I.T.H. Shot at Pinewood Studios in London in 2025, it was made without generative AI, as he declared publicly before launch. He directed the last two of its eight episodes and calls the shoot “the best five weeks of my life.” Early reviews are favourable but cooler than those for Picard: 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, a weighted 64 on Metacritic.

In March 2026, at the Saturn Awards in Universal City, California, the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films gave him its Robert Forster Artist’s Award, presented by Bettany. Away from the writers’ room his best-known obsession is a car: with Joe Walser and the films’ co-writer Bob Gale, he helped restore the original “A” DeLorean time machine from Back to the Future, unveiled at Universal Studios Hollywood in 2013. He became a father during the 12 Monkeys years, the same stretch in which he lost his own father.

The VisionQuest finale arrives on November 10. After that comes Magic: The Gathering, an animated series he has been developing for Netflix since 2023, and his script for a new version of Enemy Mine at 20th Century Studios. Both are, again, inherited worlds. Asked whether he still wants to make something entirely his, Matalas said yes, that there are “a couple of things” brewing and that he “would love to do a great supernatural horror thing at some point.” For a writer whose first original was renamed before it aired, that would be the beginning worth watching.

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