Allan Burns, co-creator of ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ dies at 85

A frequent writing partner of James L. Brooks, the six-time Emmy winner was also behind “The Munsters”, “Lou Grant” and “My Mother the Car”.

Six-time Emmy winner Allan Burns who teamed up to create one of the best sitcoms of all time,The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and one of the worst,My mother the car, is dead. He was 85 years old.

Burns died on Saturday, his frequent writer partner, James L. Brooks, reported on Twitter.

“His singular writing career has earned him every conceivable recognition.” he wrote. “But, you had to know him to appreciate his rarity. He was simply the most refined man I have ever known. A human beauty.”

No further details of his death were immediately available.

Burns, who took an early career hiatus working for animation legend Jay Ward onRocky and his friendsandThe Bullwinkle Show, also co-createdRhodaandLou Grant, of themMary tyler moorefallout, as well asThe Munsters; wrote for a season onGet smart; and invented a famous cereal character, Cap’n Crunch, and his nemesis, the pirate Jean LaFoote.

He can also claim to have discovered Jim Carrey.

Burns has occasionally worked in films, and he was nominated for an Oscar for Adapted Screenplay forA little romance(1979), a whimsical teenage adventure starring a young Diane Lane and Laurence Olivier.

Burns, however, made his eternal mark on television, spending more than two decades as a writer and producer for MTM Productions. His first job for the fledgling company, started by producer Grant Tinker and his wife, Mary Tyler Moore, was to concoct the premise for a CBS comedy that would star Moore, who had shone for five seasons.The Dick Van Dyke Show.

It was Tinker’s idea to associate Burns with Brooks. The two had worked together on222 room, an ABC comedy-drama set in a downtown school that Brooks had created, and Brooks had written scripts forMy mother the car.

“He and Mary were looking for someone to write a pilot and come up with a concept for his show, which had a 13 episode engagement on CBS, and he picked us,” Burns said in a 2012 interview for the Writers Guild Foundation’s The Writer Speaks web series. “That to me was kind of amazing; I mean we had credits, and they were pretty good, but still”

In their original concept, Moore’s Mary Richards portrayed a divorcee working as a bloodhound for a Hollywood columnist. “No one had done a show about a person’s divorce,” Burns noted. Tinker and Moore loved the idea that the two had divorced, but CBS executives had “a corporate heart attack” when they heard what the writers had in mind.

According to Burns, a CBS executive told them, “Our research shows us that there are four things the American public doesn’t like: New Yorkers, Jews, mustaches, and divorce.”

He added: “Over the next two weeks we had the idea of ​​doing it in a newsroom. Jim had worked in a newsroom in New York and said, ‘I always thought that ‘was a great place for comedy. ” also made Mary an abandoned woman who moved to Minneapolis after a broken engagement.

As a single, independent woman in the workplace, the character has become an icon of the feminist movement.

The Mary Tyler Moore Showraced for seven seasons, from September 1970 to March 1977, and collected a record 29 Emmys. Burns and Brooks won five trophies for their efforts on the show; the latter two were for outstanding comedy series and for writing (along with four others) the admired series finale.

Not admired but certainly ridiculed,My mother the carJerry Van Dyke played the role of a lawyer who purchases a 1928 Porter Stanhope at a used car lot and discovers that the antique vehicle is the reincarnation of its mother. Created by Burns and Chris Hayward, the comedy lasted only 30 episodes in 1965-66 before being discontinued.

“It’s good to know that some people thinkThe Mary Tyler Moore Showis one of the best shows ever and I’ve also done a show that everyone is sure is the worst, ”he said during a 2004 conversation for The Interviews: An Oral History of Television.

Allan Burns was born on May 18, 1935 in Baltimore. His father died at the age of 9 and three years later he and his mother moved to Honolulu, where his older brother was stationed in Pearl Harbor.

He attended the private school in Punahou (Barack Obama would go there later) and designed a cartoon which aired twice a week in theHonolulu Star Bulletinnewspaper.

Burns received a partial scholarship to study architecture at the University of Oregon, but left school in 1955 and moved to Los Angeles, where he landed a job as an NBC page. He asked what he said during the interview that convinced his new employer to hire him.

“You said you were 42, didn’t you? Well, that’s the only uniform we have right now. Someone just resigned,” he recalls. “The reason I’m in show business is because I’m a 42 long, that’s the truth.”

Burns submitted jokes toTonight’s showand comedians George Gobel and Jonathan Winters without taking a bite and reading scripts as part of a new NBC comedy writing development program. He was fired, then lasted about a month as a writer for the game showTruth or consequences.

After spending the next two years writing gags and drawing cartoons for greeting card companies, Burns gathered a portfolio of his work and walked into Ward’s office on Sunset Boulevard without an appointment. .

As Burns was trying to make his way into a reunion with Ward, the producer passed by. “He looks at all my stuff, starts laughing and says, ‘When do you want to start?’ Burns remembers. He began by working on promotional flyers forRocky and his friendsandThe Bullwinkle Show, later graduated from “Fractured Fairy Tales” and other bits for $ 215 a week.

While Ward was on vacation, Burns met executives from the Quaker Oats Co. and designed the mascot, an 18th century sea captain, for Cap’n Crunch. They wanted the designer to know that the new cereal “stays crisp even in milk”.

“Stays crunchy even in milk? Stays crunchy even in acid,” Burns joked.

He and Chris Hayward had co-created the Canadian Mountie Dudley Do-Right for Ward’s Company, and in 1965 they wrote the pilot for CBS ‘My brother the angel, a sitcom starring the Tommy and Dick Smothers, before launchingmyMother the car.

“It sold, someone bought it, someone must have thought it was funny, but the critics sure didn’t,” he said in his interview on Oral. History. “I probably spent the rest of my life experiencing this spectacle. We really promise you that you wanted this to be satire, and it turned out to be the worst of all the shows we thought we satirized.

The naive Burns and Hayward had presented their idea forThe Munstersto an unscrupulous agent, who then passed the idea on to writers Norm Liebmann and Ed Haas at Universal. When they learned that the Comedy About A Family of Monsters was in production on CBS, they petitioned the WGA and received their due credit.

Burns and Hayward then wrote for the 1967-68 CBS sitcomHe and she, with Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss, and Burns won his first career Emmy (shared with Hayward) for it. When it was canceled after a season,He and shecreator Leonard Stern brought them aboard another show he was producing,Get smart.

It was the fourth season of the spy parody, the one in which Agents 86 (Don Adams) and 99 (Barbara Feldon) got married. “I don’t remember this being a particularly good idea,” he said. Burns remembered this after Rhoda Morgenstern’s wedding in 1974, when ratings for sitcom Valerie Harper plummeted.)

He and Hayward went their separate ways after about four years together when Burns wanted to work on a movie script and Hayward didn’t. (The movie ended up not being made.)

Burns and Brooks (with Gene Reynolds) also created the thought-provoking 1-hour MTM-CBS dramaLou Grant, which marked an unprecedented gender shift for a spin-off. The show got off to a slow start, perhaps because viewers were expecting to see the sitcom version of Ed Asner.Mary tyler moorecharacter.

“The CBS guy at the time told us, ‘Fellas, what you seem to be doing isThe New York Times. People don’t readThe New York Times, they read theDaily News“Burns remembers.” I remember Grant had blown up, “You don’t want toThe New York Timeson your network ?! ‘”

Grant told executives of the network, “” Well, guys, hang in there, the show is good, it’s going to work. “And he said to us, ‘Keep doing what you’re doing.’ “

Burns saw Carrey perform at a West Hollywood comedy club and hired him to play the part of a cartoonist on a 1984 sitcom he created,The duck plant. Burns based the show on his experiences working for Ward.

Other shows he created for MTM includedPaul Sand in Friends and Lovers;Eisenhower and Lutz, with Scott Bakula; andFM, installed in a public radio station. He received 16 Emmy nominations in all, and he and Brooks were honored in 1988 with the prestigious Laurel Award from the WGA.

For the big screen, Burns also wroteButch and Sundance: the early days(1979) and Kristy McNichol’s romantic comedyJust the way you Are(1984) and wrote and directedJust between friends(1986), with his old friend Moore.

Duane Byrge contributed to this report.