David Mirkin (born ) 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 (2007) 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 (1997) and Heartbreakers (2001).
Early life
Mirkin was born and raised in Philadelphia, the son of Saul Mirkin (born Saul Capan) and Jennie Belkin. He graduated from Northeast High School in 1975. 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.
Mirkin intended to pursue a career in electrical engineering, which he saw as a more stable employment opportunity than writing or film making.
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. 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 [he writes]". 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 "felt [Newhart] was where I belonged. I'd finally come to a place in my life where everything I'd ever wanted had come together." It was the first nomination the show had received in that category and for the first episode Mirkin wrote as the series' showrunner. Mirkin left Newhart in 1988, desiring to work on a single-camera sitcom.
Get a Life and The Edge
right|thumb|175px|Mirkin created Get a Life alongside [[Chris Elliott, who was also the show's lead actor]]
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 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 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. Mirkin had long wished to produce a sketch show, 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." 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, Executive producers James L. Brooks and Richard Sakai hired Mirkin following his exit from The Edge. He had been asked to join the show's writing team when it started in 1989, but decided instead to work on Get a Life. He was a fan of The Simpsons before being hired for the show, Mirkin was the program's first solo showrunner.
Mirkin's tenure on The Simpsons has been cited as a period where the series evolved to focus more on abstract and surreal stories and humor. A. O. Scott notes that "several veterans recall the 'crazy David Mirkin years' as a time of wild inventiveness." In The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History (2009), John Ortved describes Mirkin's era as moving the show away from more "realistic" emotional and character-based stories to "pure comedy" and "surreal" humor. In a 2004 interview with Animation Magazine, Mirkin stated that he felt that he "brought [the show] back to a more story-oriented" approach and increased the focus on characters and their emotions, although "at the same time still keeping it surreal and weird". He aimed to put "as much blood and guts" as possible into the episode "Treehouse of Horror V" as an attack on the censors.
Ortved—using interviews with writers Bob Kushell and Brent Forrester and Mirkin's assistant Charleen Easton—describes Mirkin as an "outsider" on the show, with the writing staff, at least initially, divided with respect to Mirkin's comedy and leadership style. Forrester described the latter as "a little bit dictatorial". Mirkin conducted the show's writing sessions in one room, rather than splitting the writers into two groups, as later showrunners would do, and often worked late into the night. In 2004, Mirkin stated that he "really wasn't at all intimidat[ed] to join [the show's writing] crew", because he "had worked with and written with" many of his fellow writers previously and concluded that, "[I took] this show in a direction that is more personal to me. I did that, had a great time doing that, and everyone was very receptive to that." The idea proved controversial to some of the show's writing staff, who felt that having Homer go into space was too "large" an idea. During re-writes, Mirkin and the other writers placed greater emphasis on the relationship between Homer and his family and on Homer's attempts to be a hero, and in Chris Turner's book, Planet Simpson, he says the episode is "second to none". Regarding the long sequence that begins with Homer eating potato chips in the space shuttle and ends with Kent Brockman's dramatic speech, Turner claimed that it was "simply among the finest comedic moments in the history of television". A copy of the episode was later sent to the International Space Station for astronauts to view. Mirkin considers the episode to be "very very special".
Mirkin pitched the plots for the episodes "The Last Temptation of Homer", "Bart's Girlfriend" and "Homer the Great". He also produced the two-part episode "Who Shot Mr. Burns?", which aired as the finale of season six and the premiere of season seven. The writers decided to write the episode in two parts with a mystery that could be used as a contest. Mirkin suggested Maggie Simpson as the culprit because he felt it was funnier and wanted the culprit to be a family member.
After season six, Mirkin suggested Oakley and Weinstein take over as showrunners, but remained on the show in an advisory capacity, helping them with technical aspects of the show such as editing and sound mixing, and attending table readings of the scripts. He was the executive producer for three other episodes from season seven: "Lisa the Vegetarian", "Radioactive Man" and "Team Homer". "Lisa the Vegetarian" was approved by Mirkin after the story was pitched by Cohen; Mirkin had just become a vegetarian himself, and so many of Lisa's experiences in the episode were based on his own. Mirkin flew to London to record the episode's guest stars Paul and Linda McCartney at Paul's recording studio, where the McCartneys spent an hour recording their parts. Mirkin later said that recording with the McCartneys was one of the most "amazing" experiences of his life and considers the episode to be one of his favorites. He pitched the plot for "The Joy of Sect", because he was attracted to the notion of parodies of cults, calling them "comical, interesting and twisted".
Mirkin still works part-time on the show as a consultant, helping with the re-write process. The show's nine-month production cycle allows him to contribute to each episode in some form, whilst engaging in other projects as well. and the 3D animated short The Longest Daycare in 2012, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. Mirkin won four Primetime Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award for his work on The Simpsons. James Berardinelli wrote that Mirkin "brings a lot of energy to the production, always keeping things moving", while Jack Matthews of the Los Angeles Times says Mirkin "knew exactly what he had here and composed it like frames in a comic strip, ordering cheerful snow-cone colors for everything from the girls' childlike outfits to the decor of a Laundromat".
In 1999, several of the Fox executives who had disliked Get a Life came to Mirkin and apologized for the way they had treated the show, stating that they now found it funny. They commissioned Mirkin to write, produce and direct a similarly themed show of his choice. Mirkin produced a pilot for Jeff of the Universe, a "sarcastic" parody of the science fiction genre. The executives who had disproved of Get a Life had since moved from the Fox Network to Fox Studios, and they liked this new show. However, the new executives at Fox did not, and chose not to air the show. Mirkin often plays clips from the show at the talks he does at colleges; they receive a positive response.
Heartbreakers, Mirkin's second film as a feature director, was released in 2001. Mirkin rejected the project three times because he disliked the script. While he liked the idea of a mother and daughter con-woman team, he found the writing "really broad", and "it had no emotion in it." Eventually, Mirkin was allowed to rewrite the script himself, which he did in a year's time. He filmed the project in Florida and Los Angeles and had a cameo appearance in the film as Jack's lawyer. Roger Ebert said the film was not "as sly and has no ambition to be [as] charming" as Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, "but in a season of dreary failed comedies it does what a comedy must: It makes us laugh". Chris Hewitt of Empire wrote that "Mirkin's direction is a little flat, but he's clearly having tremendous fun," but Susan Wloszczyna of USA Today opined that Mirkin "never gets the timing right and allows the story to drag with little internal logic".
Mirkin was attached to direct Sports Widow in 2004, a comedy starring Reese Witherspoon as a disregarded housewife who seeks to become an expert in American football in order to regain her husband's attention; the project has never been completed. Mirkin is a fan of the musician James Taylor; Taylor guest starred in "Deep Space Homer" and Mirkin directed the music videos for his songs "Enough to Be on Your Way" and "Sea Cruise". , Mirkin will write, direct and co-produce a biopic of businessman Richard Branson, based on his memoir Losing My Virginity.
Personal life
Mirkin is a vegetarian.
Credits
{|class="wikitable sortable plainrowheaders"
|+Film
|-
! scope="col" | Year
! scope="col" | Title
! scope="col" | Role
|-
| 1986
| Last Resort
| Actor (as Walter Ambrose)
|-
| 1997
| Romy and Michele's High School Reunion
| Director
|-
| 2001
| Heartbreakers
| Director<br />Actor (as Jack's lawyer)
|-
| 2007
| The Simpsons Movie
| Writer
|-
| 2012
| The Longest Daycare
| rowspan="4" | Writer, short film
|-
| rowspan="2" | 2022
| When Billie Met Lisa
|-
| The Simpsons Meet the Bocellis in "Feliz Navidad"
|-
| 2024
| May the 12th Be with You
|}
{|class="wikitable sortable plainrowheaders"
|+Television
|-
! scope="col" | Year
! scope="col" | Title
! scope="col" | Role
! scope="col" class="unsortable" | Notes
|-
| 1983–1984
| Three's Company
| Writer, story editor
| Wrote: "Janet's Little Helper", "Out on a Limb", "Now You See It, Now You Don't", "Look What I Found", "Jack Takes Off", "Forget Me Not" (teleplay)
|-
| 1984
| Three's a Crowd
| Writer
| Wrote: "A Little Competition"
|-
| 1984–1988
| Newhart
| Executive producer and showrunner, writer, director, executive script supervisor
| Wrote: "Lady in Wading", "You're Nobody 'til Somebody Hires You", "The Geezers in the Band", "The Stratford Horror Picture Show", "Torn Between Three Brothers", "Co-Hostess Twinkie", "Thanksgiving for the Memories", "Night Moves", "Telethon Man", A Friendship That Will Last a Lunchtime", "A Midseason's Night Dream"<br />Directed: "Night Moves", "Telethon Man", "A Midseason's Night Dream"
|-
| 1986
| It's Garry Shandling's Show
| rowspan="2" | Writer
|
|-
| 1987
| The Tracey Ullman Show
|
|-
| 1990–1992
| Get a Life
| Creator, executive producer, writer, director, actor
| Wrote: "Terror on the Hell Loop 2000", "Drivers License", "Married", "Psychic 2000", "Chris Moves Out", "Girlfriend 2000", "Clip Show"<br />Directed: "Terror on the Hell Loop 2000", "The Prettiest Week of My Life", "Drivers License", "Bored Straight", "The Counterfeit Watch Story", "Married", "The Construction Worker Show", "Neptune 2000", "Chris and Larry Switch Lives", "Psychic 2000", "Chris Moves Out", "Larry on the Loose", "Meat Locker 2000", "Chris Gets His Tonsils Out", "Prisoner of Love", "Girlfriend 2000", "Bad Fish", "Spewey and Me", "1977 2000", "Clip Show"<br />Actor: "Larry on the Loose" (as Businessman)
|-
| 1991
| The Julie Show
| Creator, executive producer
|
|-
| 1992–1993
| The Edge
| Creator, executive producer, writer, director
|
|-
| 1992, 1998
| The Larry Sanders Show
| Writer, consultant, director
| Directed: "The Beginning of the End"
|-
| 1993–present
| The Simpsons
| Executive producer and showrunner (1993–1995, 1996, 1998)<br />producer, consulting producer and writer
| Wrote: "Deep Space Homer"<br />Co-Wrote: "The Man Who Came to Be Dinner (with Al Jean)"<br />Directed: "Treehouse of Horror VI" (live-action segment)
|-
| 1999
| Jeff of the Universe
| Creator, producer, director, writer
|
|}