David Mirkin


David Mirkin is an American feature film and television director, writer and producer. Mirkin grew up in Philadelphia and intended to become an electrical engineer, but abandoned this career path in favor of studying film at Loyola Marymount University. After graduating, he became a stand-up comedian, and then moved into television writing. He 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. After an unsuccessful attempt to remake the British series The Young Ones, Mirkin created Get a Life in 1990. The series starred comedian Chris Elliott and ran for two seasons, despite a lack of support from many Fox network executives, who disliked the show's dark and surreal humor. He moved on to create the sketch show The Edge starring his then-partner, actress Julie Brown.
Mirkin left The Edge during its run and became the executive producer and showrunner of The Simpsons for its fifth and sixth seasons. 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. He won four Primetime Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award for his work on The Simpsons. Mirkin stood down as showrunner after season six, but produced several subsequent episodes, co-wrote The Simpsons Movie and from 2013 onwards has remained on the show as a consultant. Mirkin has also moved into feature film direction: he directed the films Romy and Michele's High School Reunion and Heartbreakers.

Early life

Mirkin was born and raised in Philadelphia, the son of Saul Mirkin and Jennie Belkin. He graduated from Northeast High School in 1975. He is Jewish. His father was a computer engineer who was working at the Naval Aviation Supply Department at the time of his death from a heart attack in 1960, aged 49. Mirkin's older brother, Gary, worked as a television engineer for the Philadelphia NBC affiliate, KYW-TV, now a CBS owned-and-operated station. Throughout his childhood, Mirkin had an interest in film, and explored both writing and filming. Mirkin has described himself as a "nerd" and was often in trouble as a child because he was "in another world". At high school, he felt the teaching was "too slow" and was allowed by his teachers to "skip class two to three days a week".
Mirkin intended to pursue a career in electrical engineering, which he saw as a more stable employment opportunity than writing or film making. He 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. Mirkin found the experience to be monotonous and unenjoyable and chose to abandon this career path. He 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. He attended film school at Loyola Marymount University, and graduated in 1978.
Mirkin lists Woody Allen and James L. Brooks as his writing inspirations and Stanley Kubrick and the work of the comedy group Monty Python as developing his "dark sense of humor". He considers Mike Nichols's film The Graduate to be what inspired him to enter directing.

Career

Early career on ''Three's Company'' and ''Newhart''

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. The first joke he used in his routine was, "Is it just me or has everybody been coughing up blood lately?" Mirkin considers the joke to be "an insight into the way ". Stand-up comedy was the most profitable and easily accessible route Mirkin found into the comedy industry, but "it wasn't a lifestyle that particularly coveted," especially due to the traveling required.
He got his first job writing for television on the sitcom Three's Company in 1983. Through his cousin, Mirkin met writer George Tricker who became his mentor. Tricker wrote for the Three's Company spin-off The Ropers so Mirkin wrote a spec script for an episode of The Ropers. Although rejected by the producers of The Ropers, Three's Company creator Bernie West was impressed by the script and Mirkin began pitching ideas for that series instead. Mirkin pitched to the series' story editors for several years without success because they had very limited script buying power. He was eventually able to pitch to the show's producers, who bought a script from him, and then hired him as a staff writer. Mirkin was apprehensive about the job because he was aiming to work on Cheers, a show more focused on character-driven humor which Mirkin preferred writing, but felt he could not turn the opportunity down. Mirkin considered Three's Company to have "a classic French farce structure", as "the characters were so stupid they could never say anything clever." This meant Mirkin had to adapt his preference for character-driven comedy to fit the show; it "forced you to put all the cleverness into the plot, a much more difficult thing to do. The plot had to get all the laughs". Mirkin felt the experience "taught a lot about structure" which greatly aided his later work on character-focused shows.
Still hoping to work on Cheers, Mirkin sent a spec script of an episode of Taxi to Cheers writers Ken Levine and David Isaacs. The two approved and offered Mirkin a freelance job writing one of the final nine episodes of the show's first season, pending their commissioning by NBC. The episodes were commissioned, but Mirkin's agent rejected the Cheers job without telling his client, failing to see why Mirkin would want to work on what was then the lowest-rated comedy on television. Mirkin sacked the agent and signed on with Robb Rothman. Rothman knew Dan Wilcox, the executive producer of Newhart, which like Cheers was more character-focused. Rothman persuaded Wilcox to hire Mirkin. Mirkin wrote a freelance script and in 1984 beat seven other writers to a staff position on the series. He served as a writer and supervising story editor, before being promoted to executive producer and showrunner after one and a half years. Mirkin "felt was where I belonged. I'd finally come to a place in my life where everything I'd ever wanted had come together." In 1987, he received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series for Newhart. It was the first nomination the show had received in that category and for the first episode Mirkin wrote as the series' showrunner. Mirkin directed several of the Newhart episodes he wrote because he saw directing as "a means of protecting the writing". A philosophy he carried into his later work, Mirkin felt that "being the head writer... was not enough; you had to see the material through its execution – especially the weirder stuff. You had to be right there to make sure every sick idea didn't lose any disturbing nuance." Mirkin left Newhart in 1988, desiring to work on a single-camera sitcom.
After leaving Newhart, Mirkin wrote freelance scripts for It's Garry Shandling's Show and The Tracey Ullman Show. Garry Shandling asked Mirkin to co-create The Larry Sanders Show with him. 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".

''Get a Life'' and ''The Edge''

Mirkin wanted to produce a surreal, Monty Python-esque, single-camera comedy series. He 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. The pilot was entitled Oh No, Not Them!, and featured Nigel Planer from the original series, as well as Jackie Earle Haley and Robert Bundy. Mirkin had wanted to cast comedian Chris Elliott in the pilot, but was prevented by Fox, which wanted Elliott for another show. Oh No, Not Them!, in Mirkin's words, "tested through the floor" because it was too "surreal" and "sarcastic" and was not picked up. Mirkin and Elliott decided to develop a show together, along with Adam Resnick. In 1990, they created the sitcom Get a Life, which was conceived as a dark, surreal, psychotic version of the cartoon Dennis the Menace. The show stars Elliott as Chris Peterson, a 30-year-old newspaper delivery boy who still lives with his parents, and who is increasingly losing his grip on reality. Fox was lukewarm about the idea, but Mirkin convinced them to order a pilot by understating how dark the show would be. The network executives disliked the pilot after seeing an initial run-through, but Mirkin felt that this was because they "didn't get" the show and opted not to change it. The executives enjoyed the finished pilot and it was aired. However, throughout the show's run, the network's initially negative attitude prevailed. According to Mirkin, many of the executives struggled to understand it and objected to the darkness and surrealism of the show's humor, which included the frequent death of Elliott's character, and regularly threatened to shut down production. After its first season, on the insistence of the network, Chris moves out of his parents' garage, attempts to get additional jobs to his paper route, and attempts to get a girlfriend. However, Mirkin and Elliott refused to " the essential goofiness of the show".
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". The show's production process was lengthy; Mirkin would rise at to film the show, write further episodes from until, and then repeat that the following day. Unlike most single-camera shows, which have around six days to film, Mirkin had to film each episode in two days. He enjoyed doing it, but described it as "not a healthy way to live". Due to the logistics of filming the show, especially its many sets and effects, Mirkin convinced Fox to not film it in front of a studio audience and use a laugh track instead. The show achieved steady ratings in its first season, finishing 92nd out of the listed in the Nielsen ratings. However, for its second season, it was moved from on Sunday to on Saturday and lost the bulk of its audience; it was canceled after that second season finished in 1992. In a 1999 piece about the show's DVD release, Tom Shales praised the show, concluding, "At its best, Get a Life achieved dizzying heights of surrealist farce. At its worst, it was at least amusingly idiotic existential slapstick. Get a Life is a television classic unlike any other. For one thing, most of the others are better. We're not talking Playhouse 90 here, after all. But we are talking riotous nonsense, and that's not to be sneezed at. It's to be laughed at. Hard." A strong cult following subsequently developed, and Mirkin noted that although the show was canceled "ultimately we got the audience I was hoping for and they are super dedicated and passionate to this day."
In 1991, Mirkin wrote a pilot with Julie Brown entitled The Julie Show, starring Brown, but NBC did not produce it. Several people at the network enjoyed it and commissioned The Edge, a sketch comedy show also written by Mirkin and Brown, with Mirkin directing. NBC opted against production, but Fox ran it from 1992 to 1993. 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. The Edge was a ratings success and was supported by the network. Mirkin considered it "the first time I experienced the feeling of having a hit that I created. It just kept building and growing." The show's material often inflamed its targets, particularly producer Aaron Spelling. Spelling objected to a sketch mocking his series Beverly Hills, 90210, another Fox show, and its lead actress Tori Spelling, who is his daughter. He demanded a public apology and that no further episodes contain the parody, threatening to sue. The show's production company TriStar Television refused, while Mirkin responded: "The thing about these parodies is they don't hurt a show. It's only cross-promotion. The viewers who like the show always come back the next week. What's upsetting to me is it shows absolutely that Mr. Spelling has no sense of humor." Mirkin left his role as executive producer of The Edge during its run. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that Mirkin had been "forced off the show", due to the negative reaction of Spelling and others, though in 2012, Mirkin stated that he left the series after refusing to accept a substantially reduced budget. The show's producers Sony failed to persuade him to stay but he returned to the series to produce its final "Best Of" compilation.