Watching television as she grew up in the 1950s in New York, Susan Harris concluded, as do many viewers, that "anybody could write this." Unlike most who make the claim, however, she persisted in preparing work for television, and by 1969 she found a way to present it to the creator of Then Came Bronson, a short-lived NBC series. The show needed a script and she sold one. In 1970 Garry Marshall brought her to the anthology series Love, American Style, for which she wrote ten scripts. There she met Norman Lear and ended up writing scripts for his breakthrough series All in the Family, taking her son with her to the story meetings. Following the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 decision Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion in the United States, Lear decided to address the highly charged abortion issue in Maude, a spin-off from All in the Family. Susan Harris wrote the script for "Maude's Abortion," a sensitive and sensible examination of a married couple's choices in light of the court's deci­sion. She received the Humanitas Award for her ef­forts. The Catholic Church, expectedly, disapproved of the story, not the last time Harris would hear from that institution. 

     During those years she met producers Paul Junger Witt and Tony Thomas, and with them formed an inde­pendent television production company, Witt/Thomas/Harris, in 1976. For the new company Harris created and wrote Fay, starring Lee Grant, a series essentially canceled by NBC before it aired. (Grant described the NBC executives as the mad programmers.) Harris's next effort was no less controversial, but far more successful. In 1977 she was the sole writer of the series Soap, which was attacked by Newsweek magazine, Southern Baptists, and Roman Catholics before any of them had seen it. The butler in Soap was spun off in a new series, Benson, and Harris then went on to create and write I'm A Big Girl Now, Hail to the Chief, The Golden Girls, Empty Nest, and Good and Evil. After retiring from television, she commented in 1995 that her favorite series was Soap.

     Harris recalled that on most of the shows with which she was associated before creating her own company, men were writing about women. Maude, she noted, had an all-male staff. By the time she received the Emmy Award for The Golden Girls in 1987, Harris had literally changed the face of television comedy. Her fe­male characters were well defined and represented an array of personality types. Working alone, she sparked a revolution as a woman writing about women, while providing insight into male personalities as well. On the cutting edge, she drew the wrath of self-styled moralists even as she used wit, satire, and farce to provide a new kind of television.

     Since its founding in 1976, Witt/Thomas/Harris has grown to become the largest independent producer of television comedy in the United States. Married to her partner, Paul Witt, Susan Harris is now active in community projects and an avid art collector.