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Martin Cohan

Marty Cohan, who is best known for co-creating Who’s the Boss? died Wednesday. He had an extremely long career in Hollywood, starting as an assistant director and then got some writing assignments at the then-new MTM productions, where he was assisting Jay Sandrich on some episodes of Mary Tyler Moore. He wrote a bunch of Mary episodes, freelanced for other shows including All In the Family and The Partridge Family, and acted as producer on the second season of The Bob Newhart Show. (“Producer” at that time meant more than it does now; the writer who got the title of “producer” was often in charge of supervising the writing, while the “executive producer” was more an overall job.)  After leaving MTM he created a Love Boat-style show called Flying High, wrote and produced for Diff’rent Strokes, and was credited as a co-creator of Silver Spoons though the final version was re-developed by others. His most famous credit, as I say, is creating Who’s the Boss? with fellow MTM graduate Blake Hunter. The show is, as I have said many times before, a quintessential example of a show that looks like a bad comedy until you look closer and notice how good, solid and strong the writing and characters are. That’s why the scripts have been successfully adapted verbatim in other countries.

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