Eric Overmyer, a playwright known for his linguistic gymnastics who shifted largely to working in television in the mid-1980s and contributed scripts to prestigious, gritty series like “St. Elsewhere,” “Homicide: Life on the Street,” “The Wire,” “Treme” and “Bosch,” died on March 16 in Mount Vernon, N.Y. He was 74.
His death, in a care facility, was from complications of Parkinson’s disease, his wife, Ellen McElduff, said.
“His scripts have a remarkable ability to thrill, enlighten and bemuse,” Tom Fontana, a writer and producer of the NBC medical drama “St. Elsewhere,” who recruited Mr. Overmyer to write for the show, said in an online tribute. They had known each other as young playwrights.
During the filming of an episode of “Homicide” written by Willie Reale, Mr. Overmyer, then a supervising producer of the Baltimore-set NBC police procedural, added a line to a scene when two detectives see a murder victim’s sliced-off nose being grilled on a backyard barbecue.
“As we contemplated the scene, Eric started giggling,” said David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun reporter who wrote the book “Homicide” was based on, created “The Wire,” and developed “Treme” with Mr. Overmyer.
Mr. Overmyer first proposed that one detective say to the other, “Forget it, Falsone, it’s Highlandtown,” noting the Baltimore neighborhood while also paying homage to the oft-quoted final line of the 1974 detective film “Chinatown.” But, Mr. Simon recalled in a phone interview, Mr. Overmyer then thought it was funnier to say, “Forget it, Jake, it’s Highlandtown,” much closer to the original “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”
When Mr. Simon joined the writing staff of “Homicide” in its fourth season, Mr. Overmyer was one of his supervisors. He watched episodes that Mr. Overmyer had written, and admired them, and also studied Mr. Overmyer’s scripts as he handed them in. The first drafts, which focused on structure, initially took him aback — “I didn’t see any Eric Overmyer voodoo” — then built on them dramatically in subsequent drafts, as if to say, “I’m going to write the hell out of the characters and dialogue.”
Mr. Overmyer, who was a writer and executive producer for the NBC series “Law & Order” from 2001 to 2005, became a writer and consulting producer the following year on “The Wire,” in the fourth season of Mr. Simon’s acclaimed HBO crime drama series about dysfunctional institutions in Baltimore.
The fourth season’s thematic focus was on the failure of the inner-city school system, even as it continued with the series’s overarching story lines involving the police, politicians and gang bangers.
Then, on “Treme,” about the resurrection of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, which ran on HBO from 2010 to 2013, Mr. Overmyer and Mr. Simon — both lovers of the life and culture of New Orleans — were the showrunners, in charge of all aspects of running a series. He shared in two Emmy nominations for “Treme,” and a Peabody Award in 2011.
“Six and a half years ago,” Mr. Overmyer said when he accepted the Peabody, “Hurricane Katrina, with the help of the Army Corps of Engineers and federal, state and local government, almost destroyed New Orleans. But it’s made a remarkable comeback, and for the last three years, we’ve had the privilege and pleasure of working there.”
By then, the best-selling mystery novelist Michael Connelly was planning to turn Harry Bosch, the Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective featured in many of his books, into the central character of a TV series. Mr. Connelly and his producing partner, Henrik Bastin, hired Mr. Overmyer to develop “Bosch” and then to be the showrunner of the series, which starred Titus Welliver. “Bosch” ran on Amazon Prime from 2014 to 2021.
“When we worked on the pilot,” Mr. Connelly said in an interview, “there were no other writers, and he improved things every time. As we moved to the series, with other writers, everything went through him, and I saw that he improved everything he touched. That included me. I’m the first to say I needed heavy rewriting.”
Mr. Overmyer was also a writer, developer and showrunner of “Bosch: Legacy,” a spinoff on Prime from 2022 to 2025 with Bosch as a private investigator and his daughter as a rookie L.A.P.D. cop.
Eric Ellis Overmyer was born on Sept. 25, 1951, in Boulder, Colo., and grew up in Seattle. His father, Ellis, was an aeronautical engineer, and his mother, Marjorie (Connolly) Overmyer, ran the home.
At Reed College, in Portland, Ore., Mr. Overmyer was a theater arts major who directed, acted and wrote his first plays. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1973, he performed and directed in Portland theaters, where he won a local theater prize called the Drammy Award for his supporting role in Sam Shepard’s “The Tooth of Crime,” a play with music about a battle between rock stars.
He left for New York in 1979 to study playwriting at Brooklyn College but did not get a postgraduate degree. In 1980, he began working as the business manager and then literary manager at the Off Broadway theater Playwrights Horizons.
“On the Verge, or the Geography of Yearning,” the best known of his 12 plays and adaptations, was a time-traveling comedy about three Victorian-era female adventurers searching for the last uncharted territory on Earth. It has been performed for decades at regional theaters around the country.
Mel Gussow, in his New York Times review of the play’s 1985 premiere at Baltimore Center Stage, described Mr. Overmyer’s writing as a cross between “the wordplay of S.J. Perelman” and the “world- in-a-time-warp vision of Caryl Churchill.”
That year, at Mr. Fontana’s urging, Mr. Overmyer started working on “St. Elsewhere,” about the doctors, nurses and patients at a city hospital in Boston.
The experience launched his television career, where his writing credits included “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd,” a dramedy on NBC and then Lifetime that starred Blair Brown; a 1998 ABC-TV remake of the 1954 Hitchcock thriller “Rear Window,” starring Christopher Reeve and Daryl Hannah; “Homicide: The Movie,” a 2000 NBC-TV movie follow-up to the series, written with Mr. Fontana and James Yoshimura; and “Saints & Strangers,” a 2015 National Geographic channel two-part film about the Pilgrims’s trip to America.
He married Ms. McElduff, an actress, in 1991. In addition to his wife, Mr. Overmyer is survived by two daughters, Lily and Katherine Overmyer; and a sister, Laurel Overmyer.
During the filming of “Treme,” Mr. Simon recalled, he and Mr. Overmyer were filming a funeral scene in a cemetery in New Orleans. During a half-hour delay caused by clouds that required a lighting change, craft services brought out food.
“We’re sampling the roast beef po’ boys and listening to the Treme Brass Band,” Mr. Simon said, “and Eric turns to me and says, ‘This is the most fun we’ll ever have on television,’ and to this day, he’s been proven right.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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