James L. Brooks is one of television’s most outstanding and successful writer-producers. He is also one of the few to have become a highly successful screenwriter and director of feature films. His work in both media has been recognized with numerous awards from peers and critics, and both television programs and films have been acclaimed by audiences.

Although Brooks’s career in television began as a writer for series such as My Three Sons, The Andy Griffith Show, and My Mother the Car, he also worked in a very different arena. He was a writer for CBS News in New York from 1964 to 1966. In 1966, he moved to Los Angeles and became a writer and producer of documentaries for David Wolper at Wolper Productions. By 1968, however, Brooks and his partner, Allan Burns, had created the hit television show Room 222, where they served as executive story editors. This program broke new ground for television by focusing on the career of a black high school teacher, Pete Dixon (Lloyd Haynes). The show tackled tough issues such as drug use and racial conflict in a concerned, humane manner and won an Emmy as Outstanding New Series in 1969.

Much of the same style and tone carried over into Brooks’s and Burns’s next success, The Mary Tyler Moore Show. At MTM Entertainment, Brooks and Burns were among the first members of a large group of extremely talented individuals, all working in a creatively charged atmosphere established by executive producer Grant Tinker. Tinker’s philosophy was to acquire the services of creative individuals and then assist them in every way possible to become even more productive. Brooks and Burns thrived under the system, working first on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, then creating or co-creating, Rhoda, Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers, Taxi, The Associates, and Lou Grant. On the basis of these successes, the team of Brooks and Burns became known as members of a new group of Hollywood television producers, often referred to as the “auteur” producers. They were the creative force behind their shows, imparting a recognizable, distinctive style and tone. Indeed, programs created at MTM have been referred to as the defining examples of “quality television.”

The programs were noted not only for their wit and quick jokes, but for establishing a focus on character. Most were built around groups of characters related by circumstance or profession rather than by family relations. They were quickly recognized by critics as something different from the earlier forms of television comedy focused either on zany “situations” or on domestic settings. These new programs were among the first and strongest of the “ensemble comedies” that were to dominate television for decades to come. Human frailty and the comfort of friends, professional limitations and the joy of co-workers, a readiness to take one’s self too seriously at times, matched by a willingness to puncture excessive ego: these are the hallmarks of the Brooks style of ensemble comedy. While social issues might come to the foreground in any given episode, they were always subordinate to the comedy of human manners, and to character. In this way, the MTM shows were distinguished from the more overtly issue-oriented style of Norman Lear. This focus on character and ensemble has been passed down through professional and industrial relationships into the work of other producer-writers in shows as diverse as ER and Hill Street Blues, and programs such as Cheers, Murphy Brown, or Seinfeld are clear descendants of the work of Brooks and his various partners.

In 1978 Brooks began to shift his work toward feature films. He worked as writer and coproducer on the film Starting Over and in 1983 he wrote, produced, and directed Terms of Endearment, a highly successful film in terms of both box office and critical response. As writer, producer, or director he has continued his involvement with a string of box office successes, including Jerry Maguire (1996) and As Good As It Gets (1997). He has also been instrumental as a mentor to young writer-directors in film, most notably Wes Anderson, who paid “Special Thanks” to Brooks in the credits for his films Rushmore (1998) and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).

In 1984 Brooks founded Gracie Films, his own production company, to oversee work on film and television projects. To date, the best known television programs developed at Gracie Films have been The Tracey Ullman Show and its immensely popular spin-off, The Simpsons. With some degree of irony, given Brooks’s career, these two shows are marvelously skewed views of television comedy. The Tracey Ullman Show was replete with send-ups of American TV “types” such as the housewife-mother, the bored “pink collar” worker, and the prime-time vamp. The Simpsons, using all the techniques of animation at its disposal, pokes fun at the idealized version of domestic comedy that has long been a television staple and, at the same time, serves as the site of some of television’s sharpest commentary on contemporary social and cultural life. While Brooks’s involvement with these shows remains primarily at the level of executive producer, the style and attitude he developed throughout his years in television comedy is clearly at work. In some ways he might be said to have inherited the mantle of Grant Tinker, discovering new talent, making a space for creative individuals, and changing the face of television in the process.