Eric Gilliland, a longtime comedy author finest identified for his work on Roseanne, died Sept. 1. The trigger was most cancers.
Gilliland, an Illinois native and 1984 graduate of Northwestern College, wrote for the ABC comedy from 1992 to 1996. He went on to seek the advice of on The Conners in 2019.
His first massive writing gig in TV was on Who’s the Boss? He went on to jot down for Dwelling Dolls, The Surprise Years, Boogie Howser, M.D., That ’70s Present and My Boys. His most up-to-date challenge was the podcast The Cinnamon Bear: A Vacation Journey.
Gilliland obtained WGA Award nomination in 1994 for Roseanne. In 2019, he obtained a Daytime Emmy nomination for writing the youngsters’s present The Was Was? Present.
Away from TV, Gilliland was fairly the whistler. His tooting was featured on Sam Winch’s The Lullabadeer and on the soundtrack for an episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit!.
Tributes to Gilliland proceed to pour in on Fb, like this one from Fashionable Household co-creator Steve Levitan, “Bizarre, I do know, however I discovered myself considering this morning that Eric Gilliland would have taken some perverse pleasure in understanding that, of all folks, he was outlived by Dick Van Dyke. That’s one of many methods Eric and I bonded again in eighth grade, over our mutual love for The Dick Van Dyke Present. And Monty Python, Jack Benny, The Carol Burnett Present, SNL and unhealthy puns. (Sure, folks, we began a pun membership). Eric was simply plain good and humorous. In highschool, we did performs and musicals and comedy assemblies, components of which we even co-wrote. He someway pulled off the inconceivable of being biting and candy on the identical time. Whereas doing a comedy present known as, “Little Bucky” for our native Glenview radio station with our mates Thalia Kalodimos and Betsy Brennan, I used to be so unhealthy at doing accents that Eric nicknamed me, “The person with a thousand voices.”
Gilliland’s fellow Roseanne scribe Stan Zimmerman wrote this: “After a very brutal day of ‘abuse’ from Roseanne, the writing employees determined to take out our anger and smoosh meals throughout one or her framed publicity images on the wall in our principal workplace. Someway, I ended up with the one Polaroid. And there’s Eric, smiling brightly, entrance and heart. As others have extra eloquently described Eric as a particularly vivid, witty and dry author/humorist/particular person. I do know he checked out me and Jim’s open queerness within the writers’ room as each courageous, scary and but very interesting. Fly excessive, my pal. In all the colours of the rainbow. You had been liked (and cherished) by so many.”
There was additionally this gem from Roseanne vet Matt Berry: “For the previous two days I’ve been attempting to resolve which of the numerous tales involving Eric Guilliland I wish to share together with his different family and friends as all of us cope with this brutal information. I’ve determined — and it was not simple to select one — will probably be The Story of Eric and the Potato Bar. The tv present Roseanne was produced by Carsey-Werner, which was, as manufacturing corporations go, a superb firm. The pay was excessive, the reveals had been standard, and the writing staffs had been, by and huge, of very prime quality. Additionally they had a reasonably good chef who ready a free lunch and dinner for the workers. They had been like Google earlier than Google.”
“On Roseanne we ALWAYS had been there for dinner. The truth is, we had been generally there for the next day’s breakfast. So each evening, as time for dinner approached, Eric would ship a PA all the way down to the kitchen to scope out what could be for dinner. And after a kind of recon missions to the kitchen the PA got here into the writers room and instructed Eric that the dinner for that night could be a potato bar. Now, we had little or no to reside for on the Roseanne present, and the information that one of many tiny blessings that we did have — a catered dinner — was going to be a potato bar was obtained with a lot weeping and gnashing of tooth. And Eric determined that the potato bar might go fuck itself.”
“Eric determined that somewhat than partaking of the catered dinner that evening, we had been going to order meals — utilizing the present’s bank card — from a restaurant. However not only a common restaurant — one of many nice, costly, Present Biz Italian eating places within the space. Menus had been photocopied and distributed, and Eric urged us to order something and all the pieces that we needed. And we did. We ordered Italian bread and seasoned olive oil to dip it in; we ordered calamari and shrimp and mussels marinara and artichokes and baked clams; we every ordered at the least one entrée — veal piccata, hen parmigiana, ravioli, lasagne, scampi, lamb chops, beef tenderloin. We ordered EVERYTHING. Dan Palladino and I ordered a number of bottles of chianti. We ordered desserts. I feel anyone ordered a tee-shirt.”
“An hour or so later the caravan of PAs that had gone to gather the meals started to hold it into the writers room and place bag after bag of incredible-smelling meals onto the large desk that all of us sat round throughout our writing periods. There have been heaps of meals. Mounds. There was meals on high of meals that slid off and landed on high of meals. It was a feast that Caligula would have thought-about slightly excessive. The room was joyous as we tore open one bag after one other — we had been alive once more! Individuals had been yelling, laughing, shoving meals into their mouths. I used to be working out of the room to discover a corkscrew for Palladino and my wine after I handed Eric, who was quietly seated on the head of the desk, making ready to take pleasure in his dinner. As I used to be passing him I mentioned, ‘What did you get, Eric?’ He checked out me, smiled that nice flat smile of his, and opened his to-go package deal. And there it was. Eric had gotten a baked potato.”
