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\n\tAndy Friendly<\/a>, the first producer of the long-running syndicated Entertainment Tonight<\/a><\/em> and the son of the legendary CBS newsman Fred Friendly, died Sunday at his home in Bel-Air. He was 74.<\/p>\n \n\tHis death was announced by family. His wife, actress Patricia Crowley (Please Don\u2019t Eat The Daisies<\/em>) died in September at age 91. His brother, David T. Friendly, is a Hollywood producer (Little Miss Sunshine<\/em>).<\/p>\n \n\tHis death was first reported by The Hollywood Reporter. A cause of death was not disclosed.<\/p>\n \n\tIn addition to his tenure at Entertainment Tonight, <\/em>Andy Friendly was a programming executive for CNBC and King World, serving at the former as vp primetime programs from 1990-95. At CNBC he worked on talk shows hosted by Tom Snyder and Tim Russert, among others.<\/p>\n \n\tBorn on Nov. 6, 1951, Friendly launched his TV career in the early 1970s as a junior researcher at WNBC-TV in New York. Also at the station was anchorman Snyder \u2013 Friendly would soon produce Snyder\u2019s late-night Tomorrow Show<\/em> for NBC.<\/p>\n \n\tAs the first producer of the syndicated Entertainment Tonight<\/em>, Friendly was Emmy-nominated in 1982. From 1995 to 2001, he was president of programming and production at King World Productions.<\/p>\n \n\tFriendly also served as president of the Hollywood Radio & Television Society and an adjunct professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, and he served on the boards of the USC Shoah Foundation and the Saban Community Clinic.<\/p>\n \n\tHe published his memoir, Willing to Be Lucky: Adventures in Life and Television<\/em>, in 2017.<\/p>\n \n\tIn addition to brother David, Friendly is survived by siblings, Lisa, Richard, Michael and Jon.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source deadline.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Andy Friendly, the first producer of the long-running syndicated Entertainment Tonight and the son of the legendary CBS newsman Fred Friendly, died Sunday at his home in Bel-Air. He was 74. His death was announced by family. His wife, actress Patricia Crowley (Please Don\u2019t Eat The Daisies) died in September at age 91. His brother, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2226268,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[372755,345978,22542],"class_list":["post-2226267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-andy-friendly","tag-entertainment-tonight","tag-obituary"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/First-Entertainment-Tonight-Producer-Was-74.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2226267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2226267"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2226267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2226269,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2226267\/revisions\/2226269"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2226268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2226267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2226267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2226267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}