Greg Daniels Biography

Greg Daniels was born Gregory Martin Daniels, on June 13, 1963, in New York City, to Judy and Aaron Daniels, into an upper middle class family. His father worked as the president of the ABC radio network, while his mother worked at the New York Public Library.

Greg mentioned that his primary inspiration during his growing up years was his father, who was a very funny storyteller. He also stated that while his father was not a professional athlete, he still competed in the 1968 Olympics. Greg’s father told him several funny stories while he was a kid, and some of those stories and jokes later ended up in Greg’s scripts for the television shows he wrote.

Greg Daniels enrolled into the Phillips Exeter Academy, in New Hampshire, from where he pursued his high school graduation. Following his high school graduation, he enrolled into the Harvard University, where he was batch-mates with Conan O’Brien. Both of them had wanted to become writers for television and films and together, they joined The Harvard Lampoon, a satirical humour publication published from the Harvard University.

Greg Daniels' first job upon graduating from Harvard was as a junior writer on the show titled ‘Not Necessarily the News’, a sketch comedy series which aired on HBO. Greg and Conan were both selected as the writers. However, due to some budget cuts, they had to leave the job.

In 1987 however, Greg Daniels received a big break when he was hired as a staff writer for the popular sketch comedy show titled ‘Saturday Night Live’. Conan also joined Greg on the writing team for the show. It was one of the first big breakthroughs of Greg’s career as he ended up winning an Emmy Award as a writer. He was initially hired for three weeks as a try-out, but he managed to impress everyone and became a regular writer on the show.

After working at ‘Saturday Night Live’ for close to three years, Greg left the show in 1990. In 1993, he achieved the first major milestone of his career when he was hired as a writer on the cult classic animated comedy series titled ‘The Simpsons’. He became a part of the writing staff at a time when the show’s ratings were not so great. It was assumed that the best days of the show had been behind them. Many members from the original writing team of the show had also left the show.

Greg Daniels, along with a new set of writers, ensured the show becomes relevant once again and it did. Greg wrote many hit episodes for the fifth season, such as ‘Homer and Apu’, ‘Secrets of a Successful Marriage’ and ‘Treehouse of Horror IV’. Almost all the episodes written by Greg turned out to be massively successful and helped a great deal in making Greg one of the permanent writers on the show.

Greg Daniels continued his association with ‘The Simpsons’ on the show’s sixth season as well and wrote some critically and commercially acclaimed episodes such as ‘Lisa’s Wedding’ and ‘Homer Badman’. He wrote some episode in the seventh season as well, such as ’22 Short Films About Springfield’, which was the last episode that he wrote for the show.

He was then hired as a co-writer for the sitcom titled ‘King of the Hill’ in 1997, along with Mike Judge. When he read the pilot script of the sitcom, he made some major changes to it, while also adding a few more characters. ‘King of the Hill’ was an instant success and very soon, it received a worldwide syndication and its reruns were later aired on Adult Swim and Comedy Central.

The show ran for thirteen highly successful seasons, with 259 episodes in total. It was one Fox’s longest running series and won several awards and accolades. The show was nominated for many Annie Awards and Primetime Emmy Awards and ended up receiving a Primetime Emmy Award in 1999.

Greg had been a huge fan of the British comedy mockumentary series titled ‘The Office’ and in 2005, the American version of the series premiered, with Greg as the developer and the main writer of the show. The show initially received mixed ratings, owing to a difference in the American and British people’s sensibilities regarding humour.

The second season onwards, the show became a major hit among the critics and the masses. At the 2006 Primetime Emmy Awards, the series won the Outstanding Comedy Series Award. The success of the show somehow compelled the producers to come up with a spin-off series, but Greg said that it was not the right way to go about it. He developed another show instead, based around the same format of a mockumentary with hand held documentary style look.

The show thus created was titled ‘Parks and Recreation’, which was yet another success. At one point, Greg shuffled work between ‘The Office’ and ‘Parks and Recreation’, but for the final season of ‘The Office’, he concentrated on it. ‘The Office’ had to shut down after nine seasons owing to a constant dip in the ratings after the lead character Michael Scott played by Steve Carell left the show after the seventh season.

In 2011, Greg Daniels signed a deal with NBC television to produce multiple series’ for Universal Television. He later adapted the British series ‘Friday Night Dinner’ for the American audiences.