<\/p>\n
Dontzig died Feb. 23 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles of a rare and aggressive auto-immune syndrome, Steven Peterman<\/a>, his writing partner of some 35 years, announced.<\/p>\n Dontzig and Peterman wrote 25 episodes and were involved in producing 150 installments during the first six seasons of the Candice Bergen<\/a>-starring Murphy Brown<\/a>.<\/p>\n After being elevated to executive producers by creator Diane English<\/a>, they wrote (with Korby Siamis<\/a>) the landmark two-part episode \u201cYou Say Potatoe, I Say Potato\u201d that opened the series\u2019 fifth season in 1992 and served as a response to Vice President Dan Quayle<\/a>\u2019s attack on Murphy\u2019s decision to have a baby as a single woman.<\/p>\n The controversy put the show on the front page of The New York Times as a record 70 million viewers tuned in.<\/p>\n<\/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 www.imdb.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Gary Dontzig, the onetime actor who won three Emmy Awards for his work as a writer and producer on the admired CBS sitcom Murphy Brown, has died. He was 79. Dontzig died Feb. 23 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles of a rare and aggressive auto-immune syndrome, Steven Peterman, his writing partner of some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2314704,"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":[25177],"tags":[25538,31714,21751,22556,21993,22860,21912,21738,24141,22205,21913],"class_list":["post-2314703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-celebrities","tag-actors","tag-actresses","tag-celebrities","tag-directors","tag-films","tag-hollywood","tag-movies","tag-news","tag-stars","tag-television","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Gary-Dontzig-Emmy-Winning-Writer-and-Producer-on-\u2018Murphy-Brown-Dies.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2314703","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=2314703"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2314703\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2314705,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2314703\/revisions\/2314705"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2314704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2314703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2314703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2314703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}