Stephen J. Cannell emerged as one of television’s most powerful producer-writers in the 1980s. A prolific writer, he would eventually also become a series creator, an executive producer, a director, a station owner, and the head of his own studio. He specializes almost exclusively in crime shows and action-adventures, and his work, by its sheer volume, has played a significant role in redefining the parameters of those genres. Early in his career, he created and produced programs with such other crime show auteurs as Jack Webb, Roy Huggins, William Link and Richard Levinson, and Steven Bochco.

Like many other aspiring television artists in the 1960s, Cannell got his start at Universal Television, where he joined the writing staff of Adam-12 in 1970. After a few years of writing for several of the company’s other series, he began to create and produce his own shows for Universal, including Chase; Baretta; Baa Baa Blacksheep; Richie Brockelman, Private Eye; The Duke; and Stone. The Rockford Files, which won an Emmy for Outstanding Drama in 1978, was by far his most commercially and critically successful series of this period. The show exhibited all the trademarks of the Cannell style: a facile blending of comedy and drama, up-to-the-minute contemporary vernacular dialogue, and a protagonist who was a likable outsider, in this case an ex-convict.

In 1979 Cannell left Universal to form Stephen J. Cannell Productions. He won a Writers Guild Award for Tenspeed and Brownshoe and achieved some modest ratings success for The Greatest American Hero, but it was The A-Team that established the company as a major force in Hollywood in 1983. Adding a heavy dosage of cartoonlike action to the familiar Cannell themes, The A-Team made Nielsen’s top ten in its debut season. Three years later, Cannell had six series on the network prime-time schedule, including Hunter, Riptide, and Hardcastle and McCormick.

Many critics who had praised The Rockford Files rejected this latest batch of Cannell’s series, complaining that they were juvenile and overly formulaic. With the debut of Wiseguy in 1987, however, one of Cannell’s shows once again earned critical respect for its intelligent dialogue, complex characterization, and occasional treatment of timely issues. Wiseguy also employed an innovative new narrative structure, the “story arc,” whereby the season was in effect divided into several multipart episodes.

In an effort to lower production costs, Cannell opened a major studio facility in Vancouver, British Columbia, toward the end of the 1980s. One of the first series shot there was 21 Jump Street, the highest-rated show of the new FOX network’s first season. Scene of the Crime, a mystery anthology series for CBS’s late-night schedule, was also filmed in Vancouver and was hosted by Cannell himself.

Cannell Studios, the company he had set up in the mid-1980s to incorporate his production company and his many other diversified interests, was purchased by New World Communications in 1995. That same year, Cannell turned his attentions to a new career as a novelist. The Plan, a political thriller, was published in 1995 and became a best-seller. Since then, Cannell has written five other novels. As of late 2001, Cannell was developing projects for both film and television, including feature-film adaptations of The A-Team and The Greatest American Hero.