Darin Morgan (born 1966) 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 Award for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series. In 2015, Morgan wrote and directed one episode for The X-Files season ten, and returned again in 2017 to write and direct another episode for season eleven. He is the younger brother of writer and director Glen Morgan.
Writing career
Morgan was born in Syracuse, New York, and studied in 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 Pictures. 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. Joel Silver hired Morgan to write the second intended Tales From The Crypt film after Demon Knight, called Dead Easy (aka Fat Tuesday) a New Orleans zombie romp. However the script was rejected by producers Gilbert Adler and A. L. Katz.
The X-Files
In 1994, Morgan was cast as the Flukeman, a mutated flukeworm the size of a human being, in "The Host", a second-season episode of The X-Files, where his brother, Glen, worked as a writer and producer. The episode originally aired on September 23, 1994. The role required Morgan to wear a cumbersome rubber suit for twenty hours at a stretch, an experience he described as "terrible, just horrible."
At the suggestion of producer Howard Gordon shortly thereafter, The episode, entitled "Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster" aired on February 1, 2016. Morgan worked on the show's eleventh season, contributing the script for the episode "The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat" (aired on January 24, 2018 ).
In addition to his work as a writer, Morgan appeared in The X-Files episode "Small Potatoes" (April 20, 1997), playing Eddie Van Blundht, a self-described "loser" with the ability to shape-shift.
Morgan worked on the second episode of former X-Files producer Frank Spotnitz's Kolchak: The Night Stalker remake, as consulting producer, though the show was canceled before any of Morgan's scripts were produced. The only 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 show's DVD set. The script was later rewritten for the tenth season of The X-Files as "Mulder And Scully Meet The Were-Monster."
Morgan worked as a consulting producer on the short-lived TV reboot of Bionic Woman (2008) and Fringe (2008).