Deadline reports, Dan Wilcox, a longtime union man, producer, and writer for M*A*S*H who shared writing credit for the show’s record-breaking series finale and wrote numerous other TV credits, such as Sesame Street and Fernwood/America 2-Nite, has passed away. He was an Emmy-winning writer. He was eighty-two years old.
He passed away on February 14 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, according to Deadline, which also quotes his niece Julie Merson Rothenberg as telling the WGA. No explanation was provided.
A tenacious supporter of unions and equal rights, Wilcox was a six-decade WGA member and a longtime former board member who participated in the 2007–08 strike. In appreciation of his outstanding service to the Guild, he was given the Morgan Cox Award in 2017. WGAW President Howard A. Rodman (Joe Gould’s Secret, Savage Grace) stated: “Dan Wilcox has been, in a sustained and deeply moving way, a voice for the voiceless. His work, at once passionate and effective, has been on behalf of those who might otherwise lack the power to make themselves fully heard.”
Wilcox, who was born in New York City on April 17, 1941, began writing for the children’s program Captain Kangaroo on CBS after being contacted by his brother-in-law Marc Merson, who was the casting director at the time, for an interview. Wilcox remarked: “I almost blew the interview, I had to write spec scripts, and they weren’t very good. My uncle Jed was living at my mom’s, and we watched Captain Kangaroo together. He read my scripts, and told me I had comedy all wrong. ‘Never let the character be aware there is a problem. He thinks it’s going perfectly, and then it all falls apart!’ Jed gave me a crash course in how to write comedy that I’ve relied on my entire career.”
Wilcox went on to work on shows like What’s Happening!!, Norman Lear’s (Sanford & Son, The Jeffersons) Good Times, and PBS’s Sesame Street in the 1970s, according to Deadline. It was the first of his five career Emmy nominations, and he won an Emmy for the latter in 1970.
While working on the kids program, where Wilcox wrote for both humans and Jim Henson’s (The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth) Muppets, he met Thad Mumford (Maude, The Duck Factory), his longtime writing partner.
Deadline reports, his second Emmy nomination was for America 2-Nite, a parody talk show that aired late at night and was hosted by Fred Willard (A Mighty Wind, Best in Show) and Martin Mull (Clue, Killers). Over sixty episodes were written by him for that program, which had been formerly known as Fernwood 2-Nite.
Later, he wrote for Roots: The Next Generations, an ABC sequel miniseries that aired in 1979.
According to Deadline, Wilcox was also a producer of M*A*S*H, the wildly successful Korean War dramedy starring Alan Alda (The Four Seasons, Marriage Story) and Mike Farrell (Patch Adams, Supernatural), and Mumford joined the writing team for season eight around that time. For the duration of its eleven-season run, the program remained a mainstay among the top ten primetime shows, having done so for years.
A two and a half-hour series finale was one of the M*A*S*H episodes Wilcox contributed to writing. “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen,” which aired in February 1983, continues to hold the record for the most viewers of any series television episode ever, with over 105 million viewers and an astounding 60.2 rating/77 share.
Wilcox shared Outstanding Comedy Series Emmy nominations for M*A*S*H‘s last two seasons, as well as a 1981 writing nomination for the program, according to Deadline. For the series from 1980 to 1984, he was also nominated for five Writers Guild Awards, and he was the winner in 1980.
Before working on shows in the 1980s and 1990s like Diagnosis Murder, The Jeff Foxworthy Show, Lois & Claark: The New Adventures of Superman, Cosby, Becker, Blue’s Clues, and Murder, She Wrote, Wilcox also wrote episodes of Alice, Angie, and the brief runaway Bay City Blues.
In 1984–1986 Wilcox worked as a producer on Newhart. Watch him talk about the well-known series finale here, from his 2016 interview with the Television Academy Foundation:
Later in the interview, Wilcox talked about a TV experience from his early years.
He said: “As a kid, I was in the peanut gallery of Howdy Doody, On each episode, they would run an old-time movie. I said, ‘I can’t see,’ and a voice nearby said, ‘Shut up!’ I looked around, and it was Clarabell the Clown!”
In addition to Merson Rothenberg, he leaves behind his sister Nina Wilcox Merson, niece Wendy Merson Rich, and wife Leslie Easterbrook.