Stephen J. Cannell, the voracious writer-producer of dozens of series that included TV favorites “The Rockford Files,” “The A-Team” and “The Commish,” has died at age 69.
Cannell passed away at his home in Pasadena, Calif., on Thursday night from complications associated with melanoma, his family said in a statement Friday.
During three decades as an independent producer, he distinguished himself as a rangy, outgoing chap with a trim beard who was generally identified with action dramas full of squealing tires and tough guys trading punches. But his range was greater than for which he was given credit.
“Tenspeed and Brown Shoe” was a clever 1980 detective drama starring Ben Vereen and a then-unknown Jeff Goldblum. “Profit” was a shocking saga of a psycho businessman that was unforgettable to the few viewers who saw it. Fox pulled the plug after just four episodes in 1996. With “Wiseguy” (1987-90), Cannell chilled viewers with a film-noir descent into the underworld that predated “The Sopranos” by more than a decade.
“The Rockford Files” became an Emmy-winning classic following the misadventures of its hapless ex-con private eye played by James Garner.
“People say, ‘How can the guy who did ‘Wiseguy’ do ‘The A-Team’? I don’t know,” said Cannell in an interview in 1993. “But I do know it’s easier to think of me simply as the guy who wrote ‘The A-Team.’ So they do.”
During his TV heyday, Cannell became familiar to viewers from the ID that followed each of his shows: He was seen in his office typing on his Selectric before blithely ripping a sheet of paper from the typewriter carriage, whereupon it morphed into the C-shaped logo of Cannell Entertainment Inc.
That was all the idea of his wife, Marcia, he said, and it “appealed to my sense of hooey. . . . I’m a ham.”
Cannell in recent years had focused his attention on writing books. His 16th novel, “The Prostitute’s Ball,” will be released this month.
Cannell’s credits
TV series created by Stephen J. Cannell:
“The A-Team”
“Silk Stalkings”
“Renegade”
“The Commish”
“Cobra”
“21 Jump Street”
“Wiseguy”
“The Greatest American Hero”
“The Rockford Files”
“Baretta”
“Tenspeed and Brown Shoe”
Other Deaths
Georgy Arbatov, 87, a foreign policy adviser to Soviet leaders and the country’s top America-watcher during the Cold War, died Friday.
Russian state TV, which reported Arbatov’s death, did not give the cause of death or say where he died.
Arbatov, who advised leaders from Leonid Brezhnev to Mikhail Gorbachev and was especially close to Yuri Andropov, was credited in the West and later in Russia for understanding the Soviet system was fundamentally untenable.
From 1967 to 1995, Arbatov ran the U.S.A. and Canada Institute, an advisory body to Soviet authorities that he founded and that had huge sway over policy toward the North American continent at a time of heightened tensions between the Cold War adversaries. The Associated Press
