Eric Gilliland, a longtime comedy writer best known for his work on Roseanne, died Sept. 1. The cause was cancer.
Gilliland, an Illinois native and 1984 graduate of Northwestern University, wrote for the ABC comedy from 1992 to 1996. He went on to consult on The Conners in 2019.
His first big writing gig in TV was on Who’s the Boss? He went on to write for Living Dolls, The Wonder Years, Boogie Howser, M.D., That ’70s Show and My Boys. His most recent project was the podcast The Cinnamon Bear: A Holiday Adventure.
Gilliland received WGA Award nomination in 1994 for Roseanne. In 2019, he received a Daytime Emmy nomination for writing the children’s show The Was Was? Show.
Away from TV, Gilliland was quite 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 continue to pour in on Facebook, like this one from Modern Family co-creator Steve Levitan, “Weird, I know, but I found myself thinking this morning that Eric Gilliland would have taken some perverse pleasure in knowing that, of all people, he was outlived by Dick Van Dyke. That’s one of the ways Eric and I bonded back in 8th grade, over our mutual love for The Dick Van Dyke Show. And Monty Python, Jack Benny, The Carol Burnett Show, SNL and bad puns. (Yes, people, we started a pun club). Eric was just plain smart and funny. In high school, we did plays and musicals and comedy assemblies, parts of which we even co-wrote. He somehow pulled off the impossible of being biting and sweet at the same time. While doing a comedy show called, “Little Bucky” for our local Glenview radio station with our friends Thalia Kalodimos and Betsy Brennan, I was so bad at doing accents that Eric nicknamed me, “The man with a thousand voices.”
Gilliland’s fellow Roseanne scribe Stan Zimmerman wrote this: “After a particularly brutal day of ‘abuse’ from Roseanne, the writing staff decided to take out our anger and smoosh food all over one or her framed publicity photos on the wall in our main office. Somehow, I ended up with the only Polaroid. And there’s Eric, smiling brightly, front and center. As others have more eloquently described Eric as an extremely bright, witty and dry writer/humorist/person. I know he looked at me and Jim’s open queerness in the writers’ room as both 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 from Roseanne vet Matt Berry: “For the past two days I have been trying to decide which of the countless stories involving Eric Guilliland I would like to share with his other friends and family as we all deal with this brutal news. I have decided — and it was not easy to pick one — it will be The Story of Eric and the Potato Bar. The television show Roseanne was produced by Carsey-Werner, which was, as production companies go, an excellent company. The pay was high, the shows were popular, and the writing staffs were, by and large, of very high quality. They also had a pretty good chef who prepared a free lunch and dinner for the employees. They were like Google before Google.”
“On Roseanne we ALWAYS were there for dinner. In fact, we were sometimes there for the following day’s breakfast. So every night, as dinner time approached, Eric would send a PA down to the kitchen to scope out what would be for dinner. And after one of those recon missions to the kitchen the PA came into the writers room and told Eric that the dinner for that evening would be a potato bar. Now, we had very little to live for on the Roseanne show, and the news that one of the tiny blessings that we did have — a catered dinner — was going to be a potato bar was received with much weeping and gnashing of teeth. And Eric decided that the potato bar could go fuck itself.”
“Eric decided that rather than partaking of the catered dinner that night, we were going to order food — using the show’s credit card — from a restaurant. But not just a regular restaurant — one of the great, expensive, Show Biz Italian restaurants in the area. Menus were photocopied and distributed, and Eric urged us to order anything and everything that we wanted. 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 each ordered at least one entrée — veal piccata, chicken parmigiana, ravioli, lasagne, scampi, lamb chops, beef tenderloin. We ordered EVERYTHING. Dan Palladino and I ordered multiple bottles of chianti. We ordered desserts. I think somebody ordered a tee-shirt.”
“An hour or so later the caravan of PAs that had gone to collect the food began to carry it into the writers room and place bag after bag of incredible-smelling food onto the giant table that we all sat around during our writing sessions. There were heaps of food. Mounds. There was food on top of food that slid off and landed on top of food. It was a feast that Caligula would have considered a little over the top. The room was joyous as we tore open one bag after another — we were alive again! People were yelling, laughing, shoving food into their mouths. I was running out of the room to find a corkscrew for Palladino and my wine when I passed Eric, who was quietly seated at the head of the table, preparing to enjoy his dinner. As I was passing him I said, ‘What did you get, Eric?’ He looked at me, smiled that great flat smile of his, and opened his to-go package. And there it was. Eric had gotten a baked potato.”
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