Chris Abbott

Chris Abbott started off as a writer for "Little House on the Prairie," a long-running TV series about the frontier experiences of the Ingalls clan in the Old West of the 1800s. She went on to write for a wide variety of other shows, ranging from science fiction with the space-faring "Star Trek: Voyager" and the time-traveling "Quantum Leap" to daytime soap opera with "The Bold and the Beautiful." Abbott eventually graduated from staff writer to producer on two TV series. The first was "Magnum, P.I.," in which Tom Selleck starred as a charming private investigator recognized throughout Oahu, Hawaii, for cruising around in a Ferrari 308 GTS, sticking his nose where it didn't belong, and breaking the fourth wall. The second show Abbott worked on as a producer was "Diagnosis Murder," an interesting twist on the detective series because its star investigator was a medical doctor (played with a good sense of humor by Dick Van Dyke) who had a talent for solving the cases of his homicide detective son.