Comedy writer for “Roseanne” and “My Boys”

Eric Gilliland, a longtime comedy writer best known for his work Roseannedied on September 1st. The cause was cancer.

Gilliland, a native of Illinois and a graduate of Northwestern University (1984), wrote for ABC Comedy from 1992 to 1996. He later worked as a consultant for The Conners in 2019.

His first major job as a screenwriter on television was with Who’s the boss here?? He continued to write for Living dolls, Wonder Years, Doogie Howser, MD., The wild seventies And My boys. His most recent project was the podcast The Cinnamon Bear: A Holiday Adventure.

Gilliland received a nomination for the WGA Award in 1994 for RoseanneIn 2019, he received a Daytime Emmy nomination for the screenplay for the children’s show The “What happened?” show.

Away from television, Gilliland was a pretty good whistler. His hoots could be heard in Sam Winch’s The lullaby and on the soundtrack of an episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit!.

Tributes to Gilliland continue to pour in on Facebook, such as this one from Modern Family Co-Creator Steve Levitan: “Weird, I know, but I was thinking this morning that Eric Gilliland would have taken a perverse delight in knowing that Dick Van Dyke, of all people, had outlived him. That’s one of the ways Eric and I bonded in 8th grade, over our mutual love of The Dick Van Dyke Show. And Monty PythonJack Benny, The Carol Burnett Show, SNL and bad puns. (Yes, folks, we started a pun club). Eric was just smart and funny. In high school, we did plays and musicals and comedy shows, even co-writing parts of them. He somehow managed to be snarky and sweet at the same time. While he was doing a comedy show called Little Bucky When I sang for our local radio station in Glenview with our friends Thalia Kalodimos and Betsy Brennan, I was so bad at imitating accents that Eric nicknamed me “The Man with a Thousand Voices.”

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Gilliland’s companion Roseanne Author Stan Zimmerman wrote: “After a particularly brutal day of ‘abuse’ from Roseanne, the writing staff decided to take out our anger and smear food scraps on one of her framed promotional photos on the wall in our main office. Somehow I was left with the only Polaroid. And there’s Eric, smiling brightly, front and center. While others have more eloquently described Eric as an extremely intelligent, witty and deadpan writer/humorist/human being, I know he saw Jim’s and my open queerness in the writers’ room as brave, scary and yet very appealing. Fly high, my friend. In all the colors of the rainbow. You were loved (and cherished) by so many.”

There was also this gem of Roseanne Veterinarian Matt Berry: “For the past two days I have been trying to decide which of the countless stories about Eric Gilliland I want to share with his other friends and family as we all have to deal with this brutal news. I have decided – and it was not easy to choose one – it will be The Story of Eric and the Potato Bar. The TV show Roseanne was produced by Carsey-Werner, a production company that has proven to be excellent. The pay was high, the shows were popular and the writers were, by and large, of very high quality. They also had a pretty good chef who cooked free lunches and dinners for the staff. They were like Google before Google.”

“To Roseanne we were ALWAYS there for dinner. In fact, sometimes we were there for breakfast the next day. So every night, as dinner time approached, Eric would send a PA into the kitchen to see what was for dinner. And after one of these scouting missions into the kitchen, the PA would come into the writers’ room and tell Eric that dinner for that night would be a potato bar. Now we had very little to live for, on the Roseanne Show, and the news that one of the little blessings we had – a catered dinner – was going to be a potato bar was met with much weeping and gnashing of teeth. And Eric decided the potato bar could go fuck itself.”

“Eric decided that instead of catering that night, we were going to order food from a restaurant — using the show’s credit card. But not a regular restaurant — one of the great, expensive Italian show-biz restaurants in the area. Menus were photocopied and handed out, and Eric urged us to order whatever we wanted. And we did. We ordered Italian bread and seasoned olive oil for dipping; we ordered calamari and shrimp and mussels marinara and artichokes and baked clams; we each ordered at least one appetizer — veal piccata, chicken parmigiana, ravioli, lasagna, scampi, lamb chops, beef tenderloin. We ordered EVERYTHING. Dan Palladino and I ordered several bottles of Chianti. We ordered desserts. I think someone ordered a T-shirt.”

“About an hour later, the caravan of PAs who had gone to collect the food began carrying it into the writers’ room, placing bag after bag of incredible smelling food on the huge table we all sat around during our writing sessions. There were mountains of food. Mountains. There was food on top of food, sliding down and landing on top of food. It was a feast that Caligula would have thought was a bit over the top. The room was filled with joy as we ripped open bag after bag – we were alive again! People were screaming, laughing and stuffing food into their mouths. I was running out of the room to get a corkscrew for Palladino and my wine when I passed Eric, who was sitting quietly at the head of the table, preparing to enjoy his dinner. As I passed him, I asked, ‘What did you get, Eric?’ He looked at me, smiled his big, flat smile and opened his to-go package. And there it was. Eric had gotten a baked potato.”