David Mirkin wrote for the sitcoms Three's Company, It's Garry Shandling's Show and The Larry Sanders Show and served as showrunner on the series Newhart.
67 Facts About David Mirkin
2.
David Mirkin moved on to create the sketch show The Edge starring his then-partner, actress Julie Brown.
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David Mirkin left The Edge during its run and became the executive producer and showrunner of The Simpsons for its fifth and sixth seasons.
4.
David Mirkin has been cited as introducing a more surreal element to the show's humor, as shown by his first writing credit for the show, "Deep Space Homer", which sees Homer Simpson go to space as part of a NASA program to restore interest in space exploration.
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David Mirkin won four Primetime Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award for his work on The Simpsons.
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David Mirkin stood down as showrunner after season six, but produced several subsequent episodes, co-wrote The Simpsons Movie and in 2013 remains on the show as a consultant.
7.
David Mirkin has moved into feature film direction: he directed the films Romy and Michele's High School Reunion and Heartbreakers.
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David Mirkin was born and raised in Philadelphia and graduated from Northeast High School in 1975.
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David Mirkin's father was a computer engineer until his death in 1960.
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David Mirkin has described himself as a "nerd" and was often in trouble as a child because he was "in another world".
11.
David Mirkin intended to pursue a career in electrical engineering, which he saw as a more stable employment opportunity than writing or film making.
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David Mirkin took a course at Philadelphia's Drexel University which offered six months of teaching followed by a six-month internship at the National Aeronautics Federal Experimental Center.
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David Mirkin found the experience to be monotonous and unenjoyable and chose to abandon this career path.
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David Mirkin decided that "making no money doing something I loved was going to be better than making a good living doing something I didn't", so took "an enormous chance on show business" and moved to Los Angeles.
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David Mirkin attended film school at Loyola Marymount University, and graduated in 1978.
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David Mirkin considers Mike Nichols's film The Graduate to be what inspired him to enter directing.
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David Mirkin started out as a stand-up comedian in 1982 and performed across the United States, including at The Comedy Store, where he became a regular, and at The Improv.
18.
Stand-up comedy was the most profitable and easily accessible route David Mirkin found into the comedy industry, but "it wasn't a lifestyle that [he] particularly coveted," especially due to the traveling required.
19.
David Mirkin got his first job writing for television on the sitcom Three's Company in 1983.
20.
Tricker wrote for the Three's Company spin-off The Ropers so David Mirkin wrote a spec script for an episode of The Ropers.
21.
David Mirkin pitched to the series' story editors for several years without success because they had very limited script buying power.
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David Mirkin was eventually able to pitch to the show's producers, who bought a script from him, and then hired him as a staff writer.
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David Mirkin was apprehensive about the job because he was aiming to work on Cheers, a show more focused on character-driven humor which David Mirkin preferred writing, but felt he could not turn the opportunity down.
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David Mirkin felt the experience "taught [him] a lot about structure" which greatly aided his later work on character-focused shows.
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The episodes were commissioned, but David Mirkin's agent rejected the Cheers job without telling his client, failing to see why David Mirkin would want to work on what was then the lowest-rated comedy on television.
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David Mirkin sacked the agent and signed on with Robb Rothman.
27.
David Mirkin wrote a freelance script and in 1984 beat seven other writers to a staff position on the series.
28.
David Mirkin served as a writer and supervising story editor, before being promoted to executive producer and showrunner after one and a half years.
29.
David Mirkin directed several of the Newhart episodes he wrote because he saw directing as "a means of protecting the writing".
30.
David Mirkin did not have time, but worked as writer and consultant on the show's first season, and later returned to direct the 1998 final season episode "The Beginning of the End".
31.
David Mirkin wanted to produce a surreal, Monty Python-esque, single-camera comedy series.
32.
David Mirkin had a development deal with Newharts producers MTM Enterprises and persuaded them to buy the rights to produce a pilot for an American adaptation of the British sitcom The Young Ones.
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David Mirkin had wanted to cast comedian Chris Elliott in the pilot, but was prevented by Fox, which wanted Elliott for another show.
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Fox was lukewarm about the idea, but David Mirkin convinced them to order a pilot by understating how dark the show would be.
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The network executives disliked the pilot after seeing an initial run-through, but David Mirkin felt that this was because they "didn't get" the show and opted not to change it.
36.
David Mirkin served as executive producer for the series, directed most of the episodes, wrote several of them, and oversaw the filming and production of them all, to ensure that they had the correct "tone".
37.
Unlike most single-camera shows, which have around six days to film, David Mirkin had to film each episode in two days.
38.
David Mirkin enjoyed doing it, but described it as "not a healthy way to live".
39.
In 1991, David Mirkin wrote a pilot with Julie Brown entitled The Julie Show, starring Brown, but NBC did not produce it.
40.
David Mirkin had long wished to produce a sketch show, and designed The Edge to be "fast-paced" and "some skits overlap, end abruptly or are broken into segments", in order to maintain attention.
41.
David Mirkin demanded a public apology and that no further episodes contain the parody, threatening to sue.
42.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that David Mirkin had been "forced off the show", due to the negative reaction of Spelling and others, though in 2012, David Mirkin stated that he left the series after refusing to accept a substantially reduced budget.
43.
David Mirkin was the executive producer and showrunner for the animated sitcom The Simpsons, during its fifth and sixth seasons.
44.
Executive producers James L Brooks and Richard Sakai hired Mirkin following his exit from The Edge.
45.
David Mirkin had been asked to join the show's writing team when it started in 1989, but decided instead to work on Get a Life.
46.
David Mirkin was a fan of The Simpsons before being hired for the show, and started work in.
47.
David Mirkin hired several new writers, including Richard Appel, David X Cohen, Jennifer Crittenden, Greg Daniels, Bob Kushell, Jace Richdale and Mike Scully.
48.
David Mirkin moved the show's focus toward Homer Simpson, and developed some of its secondary characters, including Apu Nahasapeemapetilon.
49.
David Mirkin aimed to put "as much blood and guts" as possible into the episode "Treehouse of Horror V" as an attack on the censors.
50.
David Mirkin conducted the show's writing sessions in one room, rather than splitting the writers into two groups, as later showrunners would do, and often worked late into the night.
51.
David Mirkin worked on the concept for a long time, basing the story on NASA's Teacher in Space Project scheme to send ordinary civilians into space in order to spark interest amongst the general public.
52.
David Mirkin suggested Maggie Simpson as the culprit because he felt it was funnier and wanted the culprit to be a family member.
53.
David Mirkin flew to London to record the episode's guest stars Paul and Linda McCartney at Paul's recording studio, where the McCartneys spent an hour recording their parts.
54.
David Mirkin later said that recording with the McCartneys was one of the most "amazing" experiences of his life and considers the episode to be one of his favorites.
55.
David Mirkin returned to the role of showrunner to produce the episodes "The Joy of Sect" and "All Singing, All Dancing" for season nine.
56.
David Mirkin pitched the plot for "The Joy of Sect", because he was attracted to the notion of parodies of cults, calling them "comical, interesting and twisted".
57.
David Mirkin co-wrote The Simpsons Movie in 2007, and the 3D animated short The Longest Daycare in 2012, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.
58.
David Mirkin won four Primetime Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award for his work on The Simpsons.
59.
David Mirkin directed the feature film Romy and Michele's High School Reunion in 1997.
60.
James Berardinelli wrote that David Mirkin "brings a lot of energy to the production, always keeping things moving", while Jack Matthews of the Los Angeles Times says David Mirkin "knew exactly what he had here and composed it like frames in a comic strip, ordering cheerful snow-cone colors for everything from the girls' childlike outfits to the decor of a Laundromat".
61.
In 1999, several of the Fox executives who had disliked Get a Life came to David Mirkin and apologized for the way they had treated the show, stating that they now found it funny.
62.
David Mirkin produced a pilot for Jeff of the Universe, a "sarcastic" parody of the science fiction genre.
63.
David Mirkin often plays clips from the show at the talks he does at colleges; they receive a positive response.
64.
David Mirkin rejected the project three times because he disliked the script.
65.
David Mirkin filmed the project in Florida and Los Angeles and had a cameo appearance in the film as Jack's lawyer.
66.
Chris Hewitt of Empire wrote that "David Mirkin's direction is a little flat, but he's clearly having tremendous fun," but Susan Wloszczyna of USA Today opined that David Mirkin "never gets the timing right and allows the story to drag with little internal logic".
67.
David Mirkin was attached to direct Sports Widow in 2004, a comedy starring Reese Witherspoon as a disregarded housewife who seeks to become an expert in American football in order to regain her husband's attention; the project has never been completed.