Stephen J. Cannell, Prolific TV Writer, Dies at 69
By BILL CARTER NY TIMES
Stephen J. Cannell, one of television’s most prolific writers and series creators, whose work encompassed the “The Rockford Files” and “Wiseguy” to “The A-Team” and “The Greatest American Hero,” died Thursday at his home in Pasadena, Calif. He was 69.
The cause was complications from melanoma, his family said.
For 30 years, beginning in the early 1970s and extending through the 1990s, television viewers could hardly go a week without running into a show written by Mr. Cannell. His writing credits include more than 1,000 episodes of various series, primarily crime dramas, and he is listed as the creator of almost 20 series — some long-running hits like “The Rockford Files,” and “The Commish,” others quick flame-outs like “Booker. ” At one point in 1989, Mr. Cannell’s company was producing five series on three networks. One of them, “21 Jump Street,” introduced a future Oscar nominee to public acclaim: Johnny Depp.
But that was not unusual. Mr. Cannell’s shows often opened doors for emerging actors. Jeff Goldblum gained his first wide notice in a short-lived but well-remembered Cannell series, “Tenspeed and Brown Shoe.” And “Wiseguy” gave another future Oscar winner, Kevin Spacey, a chance to stand out in a memorable extended turn as a villain.
Mr. Cannell, who regarded his writing less as an art than a craft to which he was both committed and devoted, never writing less than two hours a day, shifted late in his career to crime novels and again proved he had a popular touch. Several of his 16 books, many featuring the detective Shane Scully, were best sellers.
“Most of my things strike to the same theme,” Mr. Cannell said in an interview this year in Success magazine, “which is not to take yourself so seriously that you can’t grow.”
In many ways Mr. Cannell’s own success mirrored the formula he repeated in so many of those episodes. It was a three-act, feel-good story of overcoming debilitating flaws.
Born Feb. 5, 1941, in Los Angeles, to an affluent family (his father owned an interior design business), Mr. Cannell suffered from extreme dyslexia, which went undiagnosed and all but ruined his school years. Despite inheriting his family’s intense work ethic, he failed three grades and was unable to retain a football scholarship to the University of Oregon because of his academic record.
But a professor there recognized his writing gifts and encouraged him. Once he tried to break into television writing, Mr. Cannell quickly found he had a knack for its basics. He was fast and dependable. From early work on shows like “It Takes a Thief” and “Toma” he graduated to more serious efforts, like a script for the notoriously demanding “Columbo.”
He was successful and happy, unlike many of his Hollywood writing contemporaries. He married his grade-school sweetheart, Marcia Finch, in 1964. She survives him, along with two daughters, Tawnia and Chelsea; a son, Cody; and three grandchildren.
It was while banging out a script for “Toma” that Mr. Cannell created a character named Jim Rockford. Like Rockford, Mr. Cannell often pointed out, his lead characters were flawed men who somehow found a way to get the right thing done.
Rockford was an ex-con turned reluctant detective who would rather crack wise than fight. The series, which was a hit for seven seasons, has since been credited with helping to signal a cultural shift away from the perfect physical and moral specimens of the movies and early television and toward more realistic heroes, the kind viewers had come to expect, given the harder-edged reality they saw on the evening news.
“Culture changed, and as that happened, so did our need for a hero,” Mr. Cannell said in a 1999 interview. “That square-jawed good guy began to look like an idiot to us.”
Rockford also introduced another staple of Mr. Cannell’s best work: humor. His shows tended to be leavened either with wry comedy, which so fit the performing style of that show’s star, James Garner, that he seemed inseparable from the role, or extremely broad comedy, typified by “The A-Team,” the loud, seemingly mindless action series that ran for five years in the mid-’80s, all but saving the NBC network in the process. That series included big set-piece action sequences with explosions and crashing vehicles — and people were hardly ever killed.
Critics and viewers often questioned how a show like that, and other Cannell titles like “Riptide, “Renegade” and the late-night series “Silk Stalkings” could spring from the same mind that created a complex, groundbreaking crime drama like “Wiseguy,” which has often been cited as a forerunner to “The Sopranos” (though David Chase, creator of that HBO series, never actually saw it).
Mr. Cannell shrugged off such puzzlement, saying he didn’t know why his work ranged so widely. “But I do know it’s easier to think of me simply as the guy who wrote ‘The A-Team,’ ” Mr. Cannel told the Associated Press in 1993. “So they do.”
“I’m generally a very happy guy, because I’m doing what I want,” Mr. Cannell said in the Success interview. “I’m willing to tell you that there are people who are much better than I am in writing. I don’t have to be the fastest gun in the West.”
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Originally Posted by Seshmeister
