Jay Daniel, the two-time Emmy-nominated producer who kept the chaos in check on the popular but difficult to make ABC series Moonlighting and Roseanne, has died. He was 82.
Daniel died Wednesday at Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center of a pneumonia-related illness, his wife, artist Vicky Daniel, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Daniel also partnered with Moonlighting creator Glenn Gordon Caron on Clean and Sober, the 1988 Warner Bros. film that starred Michael Keaton, in his first dramatic turn, as a real estate agent struggling with addictions to cocaine and alcohol.
Plus, he lured Moonlighting star Cybill Shepherd back to television by developing her 1995-98 CBS sitcom Cybill, created by Chuck Lorre.
Daniel was with Caron from the very beginning of Moonlighting, which starred Shepherd as Maddie Hayes, owner of the struggling Blue Moon Detective Agency, and Bruce Willis as David Addison, the playful private eye who goes to work for her.
The 20th Century Fox midseason replacement, which ran five seasons from 1985-89, became notorious for missing deadlines, with the perfectionist Caron often waiting until the last minute to write, shoot and/or edit the light-hearted, hourlong program. Further complications ensued when Shepherd got pregnant and when she feuded with Willis.
Daniel was given the difficult task of keeping the train running on time, and he told The New York Times in 1986 that “we’re just about as close as you can get to being live without being live.”
“I think a lot of the success of Moonlighting, when you look back on it, came out of spontaneity,” he noted in a 2005 interview. “At the time it was chaos, you know, the script wasn’t ready, Glenn had to go write something now or we’d have to shut down.
“His back was to the wall, and he’d go in the room and write this thing and you’d look at it and go, ‘OK, let’s shoot it,’ and then it was done. It was written the day before, sometimes the morning of, and done by the end of the day. And you know what? It was pretty damn good. Sometimes it was great.”
Daniel stuck around as showrunner for the show’s final season after Caron was fired, then joined Roseanne for its third year. On the sitcom, star Roseanne Barr often walked off the set after arguing with the writers.
“They thought of me because I had somehow kept Moonlighting going in spite of all the tumult, especially the problems between Bruce and Cybill,” he said. “It was well known that somehow Moonlighting kept going when it could have imploded at any second. So the network brought me onto Roseanne to calm the waters and try to deal with her concerns.
“It was more about the actress than it was about the strong female character she was playing. It was about me going into the lion’s den with a whip and a chair and dealing with an actor who could be very volatile, although I must say she never raised her voice to me, not once. To a lot of other people she did, but for some reason, never to me. I ended up doing that show for the better part of five seasons.”
On X, Caron wrote Thursday that there would have been “no Moonlighting without Jay Daniel. Probably no Roseanne. Definitely no Cybill. Certainly no Clean and Sober. He was simply the best.”
One of two boys, Jay Mills Daniel was born in Cushing, Oklahoma, on June 1, 1943. He graduated from Oklahoma State University and attended graduate school at UCLA as a theater arts major, wanting to be an actor. He landed an agent and appeared as a snack bar drive-in attendant in Targets (1968), the directorial debut of Peter Bogdanovich.
He decided his future was on the other side of the camera and got into the DGA trainee program, leading to a stint as an assistant director on ABC’s The Brady Bunch.
In 1973-76, he served as a unit production manager, A.D. and associate producer on NBC’s Police Story before producing the 1979-80 NBC crime series Eischied, starring Joe Don Baker.
In 1984, Daniel received a Daytime Emmy for outstanding children’s informational/instructional special for producing a CBS Schoolbreak Special episode about a man on Death Row who advises kids not to make the same mistakes he made.
He and Caron first worked together that year on Concrete Beat, a pilot for an ABC series that starred John Getz as a newspaper columnist, but it was not picked up.
“On June first of 1984, I get a call from Glenn saying, ‘You know, they want me to do this boy/girl detective thing, and they’ve given me a ‘go’ on it. Would you like to do it?’” Daniel recalled. “I said, ‘Sure,’ and that turned out to be Moonlighting. June 1 is my birthday — best present I’ve ever been given.
“Glenn took two months to write the script, and we had a long, long time to cast it. I’m sure you know all those stories. We cast Cybill early on, in July of that year, and we didn’t start shooting until October. They picked us up immediately after we delivered the pilot. I became part of Glenn’s company [Picturemaker Productions], and Moonlighting became my life.”
Daniel, Caron and others shared outstanding drama series nominations for Moonlighting in 1986 and 1987 (they lost to Cagney & Lacey and then L.A. Law), and he got to direct four episodes of the series.
He worked on Clean and Sober, Caron’s directorial debut, between the third and fourth seasons of Moonlighting.
After ending his run on Roseanne in 1994, Daniel said he “was able to convince [Shepherd] to come back to television, even after what she’d been through on Moonlighting,” and he spent three seasons as an executive producer on the sitcom about a 40ish career woman with two ex-husbands and a teenage daughter.
Daniel also was a producer on ABC’s The Naked Truth in 1997, The WB’s Maybe It’s Me in 2001-02 and ABC’s Hot Properties in 2005.
In addition to his wife of 46 years — she was a dancer when they met on a set and were together for 50 years — survivors include his niece, Lori.