David Milch

David Milch was an Emmy Award-winning television writer and producer who was best known for co-creating, along with Steven Bochco, the groundbreaking police series "NYPD Blue" (ABC, 1993-2005), as well as creating the critically-acclaimed HBO western series "Deadwood" (HBO, 2004-06). Born in Buffalo, New York, Milch attended Yale where he showed an early talent for writing fiction. He went on to graduate summa cum laude from the Ivy League university and would later enroll in the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. After earning his MFA from Iowa, Milch began teaching and lecturing at Yale. He befriended the poet Robert Penn Warren while teaching at his alma mater, and together they collaborated on co-authoring a number of college literature textbooks. In 1982 Milch wrote had his first television script produced. The script was for the cop drama "Hill Street Blues" (NBC, 1981-87), and over the next six years Milch would have a hand in writing or producing several dozen episodes of the Emmy Award-winnings. After over a decade working in film, Milch broke out big in 1993 when he co-created, along with Steven Bochco, the landmark police series "NYPD Blue." The series was groundbreaking for its time for being one of the first on network television to show brief nudity and for its use of obscene language. Milch served as a writer and executive producer on seven seasons of the show, thus cementing his status as one of the most important television writers of his generation. Milch's lofty reputation in the industry grew even further when in 2004 HBO premiered his western series "Deadwood." The series ran for three seasons and 36 episodes on the premium cable network. During "Deadwood's" brief but impactful run, and in the years since it last aired, critics have almost unanimously ranked it as one of the greatest television shows of all time. Milch created a couple of follow-up series after "Deadwood"-the surf noir "John from Cincinnati" (HBO, 2007) and the horse racing drama "Luck" (HBO, 2011-12)-but both were cancelled after one season. In 2015 Milch was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease a few months before he was to begin work on script for the eagerly anticipated "Deadwood" movie. Undeterred, Milch continued working on the script despite receiving his diagnosis and in May of 2019 "Deadwood: The Movie" premiered on HBO to rave reviews. The film received eight Emmy Award nominations, including one for Outstanding Television Movie. Additionally, 2019 was also the year Milch wrote one episode of the third season of the acclaimed television series "True Detective" (HBO, 2014-).