J.P. Miller began writing for television during that time in the 1950s when a playwright fortunate enough to see his work performed on a live network drama literally could become an overnight sensation. For Miller, that night was October 2, 1958, when the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) broadcast a live production of his play “The Days of Wine and Roses” during its prestigious drama series Playhouse 90. By the following morning, the newspapers already had heralded his ascension to the elite ranks of television playwrights, ensuring that his name would be forever linked with those of Paddy Chayefsky, Reginald Rose, Rod Serling, Horton Foote, Gore Vidal, and Tad Mosel. An Emmy nomination followed, along with a lucrative offer from Hollywood for the film rights and an opportunity to write the film adaptation, which eventually became a 1962 movie directed by Blake Edwards and starring Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick.

If J.P. Miller’s name is not recalled as quickly as that of other television playwrights of his era, it is because he was never as prolific as his colleagues or as eager to carve out a place in the television and movie industries. He was ambivalent about the business, unwilling to compromise, perhaps even spoiled by his early taste of freedom under the guidance of producer Fred Coe. After his initial burst of success on television and an inevitable courtship by the movie industry, he returned to New Jersey, where he spent 40 years working out of his home, satisfied to write intermittently for movies, television, and the stage while devoting much of his energy to his own novels. Unlike most writers able to sustain long careers in television, Miller never wrote for episodic television series or aspired to become a producer. He was a playwright who wrote individual television plays—not series episodes—and this craft, honed in the live dramas of the 1950s, did not translate easily to the conditions of the television industry after 1960. Still, Miller returned repeatedly to television, where he earned three more Emmy nominations and received the Emmy Award in 1969 for his CBS Playhouse teleplay “The People Next Door.” From the beginning of his career to the end, Miller specialized in scripts that were stark and somber, melancholy reminders that America is often a land of opportunities lost. It is a unique and unlikely vision for a writer who survived nearly four decades in television.

After World War II (during which he served as a lieutenant, earning a Purple Heart), Miller enrolled in the Yale drama school, which he attended for only a year before moving back to Houston. While in Houston, Miller divorced his first wife and then remarried, failed as a salesman of furnaces and real estate, and never strayed far from his dream of a career as a writer. Soon he moved his young family back to New York, where they lived in a small apartment in Queens. By day, Miller sold refrigeration for air conditioners; by night, he wrote plays that no one would read. Around this time, however, a friend who was a television repairman brought Miller a used television set that was missing its cabinet.

Miller discovered the quality of writing on Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse, which was an expression of the taste of its producer, Fred Coe, who also had studied at the Yale drama school. By commissioning original plays from writers such as Chayefsky, Mosel, and Foote, Coe nurtured a dramatic form influenced by the breakthrough work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams but suited to the scale of early television: intimate family dramas set in ethnic urban neighborhoods or forgotten communities in the rural South in which traditional cultures collide with the forces of modernity. Miller watched and made notes for his first television play.

“A Game of Hide and Seek,” Miller’s first television play, told of two southern sisters who had grown apart since the day years earlier when the younger sister had married an apparently wealthy stranger and moved away. When the prodigal sister returns home, abandoned and penniless, she hides her misfortune from the older sister, who is blind, until the older sister touches her suitcase and discovers that it is held together by rope. Miller delivered the script to Yale classmate Bob Costello, who had become one of Coe’s assistant producers. Coe immediately purchased the script, assigning it to his star director, Arthur Penn, and casting the stage actress Mildred Dunnock.

Miller’s first notable success came with the play “The Rabbit Trap,” the story of a long-suffering engineer at a construction firm who stands up to his bullying boss and quits the job in order to spend more time with his son. This austere critique of corporate America caught the attention of the movie studios, which were on the lookout for New York talent, and Miller was brought to Hollywood to write the adaptation, an experience that he soon came to regret when he discovered how powerless he was to affect the outcome of the film. Writers in the movie industry enjoyed neither the autonomy nor the influence they were accorded under Fred Coe’s benevolent patronage.

While Miller toiled as a screenwriter in Hollywood, fortunes faded for the live television drama. Westerns and private-detective series filmed in Hollywood climbed the ratings, and retailers for companies such as Goodyear and Philco began to pressure the corporate headquarters to sponsor programs more cheerful than the bleak dramas that had become Fred Coe’s trademark. With ratings slipping, Philco pulled its sponsorship from Television Playhouse in 1955, and Fred Coe eventually left the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and landed at CBS, where he became one of the producers for Playhouse 90, the last remaining prestige drama on television. It was in this capacity that Coe lured Miller back to television, and the result was “The Days of Wine and Roses,” a pinnacle of live television drama and very nearly the swan song for the genre.

With prime-time television utterly dominated by filmed series and the live television drama all but forgotten by 1960, Miller turned to screenwriting once again, writing The Young Savages (1961) for director John Frankenheimer, adapting his own The Days of Wine and Roses (1962), and working with director Fred Zinneman on Behold a Pale Horse (1964). From this Hollywood sojourn, Miller saved enough money to purchase a measure of independence. He married for the third time (to the woman with whom he would live for the rest of his life), bought a farmhouse in New Jersey, and began work on his first novel, The Race for Home (1968), a Depression-era tale that takes place in a thinly disguised version of the Gulf coast town where he was raised. He returned to television in the late 1960s, when CBS asked Fred Coe to resurrect the anthology drama format in CBS Playhouse, an ambitious, short-lived series of plays written for television.

Miller wrote “The People Next Door” as an unacknowledged companion piece to The Days of Wine and Roses. In this version, a suburban couple (Lloyd Bridges and Kim Hunter) struggle to understand their drug-addicted teenage daughter (Deborah Winters). Miller received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing Achievement in Drama and later wrote the feature film adaptation.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Miller charted his own course, alternating between writing novels and movies and miniseries for television. As he channeled his energies into fiction (eventually writing three more novels), he stopped writing original material for television and became a specialist in “true-life” movies and miniseries, including an Emmy-nominated script for The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case (1976) and Helter Skelter (1976), an adaptation of Vincent Bugliosi’s book about the Charles Manson case (which was the top-rated miniseries of the season). His final work for television, the Emmy-nominated 1989 miniseries I Know My First Name Is Steven, written with Cynthia Whitcomb, was based on the real-life abduction of a young boy who spent seven years living with his captor before finally escaping and being reunited with his family.