Rick Rosner

Richard "Rick" Rosner (born c. 1941) is an American television producer best known for creating the television show CHiPs.^[1] Rosner later developed a portable satellite television in partnership with DirectTV.^[2]

Life and career

Rosner's father, Alfred D. Rosner sold insurance.^[3] Rosner worked as an NBC page during college, and he returned to the job after dropping out of Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine after a few weeks. Soon he got a job as a television producer working for Allen Funt's Candid Camera.^[2]

After getting his start writing episodic television, Rosner became a producer on The Mike Douglas Show, where he introduced on-location episodes.^[4] He was an executive with Warner Bros. Inc. before NBC named him its Vice President of Variety Programming in 1975.^[5]

CHiPs

He wrote several TV movies before creating the central characters and developing the core format of the series CHiPs, about two California Highway Patrol motorcycle cops and the district out of which they worked. He had befriended members of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department during a scuba training seminar for Steve Allen, and it was while he was taking a course with the Sheriff's Department that he got the idea for CHiPs. The show was an immediate hit, and 138 episodes were transmitted between 1977 and 1983. In 2005, a CHiPs film was announced, with Wilmer Valderrama attached to the cast and Rosner "executive producing;" it was believed that, in this case, that meant serving as an "on-the-scenes" financial sponsor of the production.^[6] After years of delays and cast/production changes, the project began filming in 2016 as an R-rated action comedy to be written and directed by Dax Shepard and released in August 2017.

Lottery!

Aside from CHiPs, Rosner also created the central characters and developed the core format of Lottery!^[7] Essentially an update of producer Don Fedderson's 1950s semi-anthology series The Millionaire, Lottery! dealt with a fictitious international lottery, the "Intersweep Lottery," and the equally fictitious bank, the "Intersweep Bank," that supposedly sponsored it. Transmitted on ABC-TV in 1983 but not successful enough to last more than one season, the series starred Ben Murphy as Patrick Flaherty, one of the Intersweep Bank's actual field agents, who actually delivered the winnings, and Marshall Colt as Eric Rush, an IRS agent whose task was to help the winners deal with the taxation issues that arose, since unlike the one-million-dollar checks that the tycoon John Beresford Tipton paid out in The Millionaire, on which the taxes had already been paid, lottery winnings are taxable in states where they are authorized under the local laws. (All 17 installments of the series ended with a disclaimer saying not only that the Intersweep Lottery was fictitious, but also that outside states that authorized and regulated them, "lotteries in this country are illegal.")

Game shows

Rosner's company also produced three game shows. In 1983, his Just Men! featuring Betty White premiered on NBC but was cancelled after thirteen weeks. Rosner revived Hollywood Squares with John Davidson as host in 1986, with this series running for three years in syndication and proving to be Rosner's most sustained game show success. He later developed Caesars Challenge for NBC in 1993, which was the network's final daytime game show.

Filmography

• Sky Heist
• 240-Robert
• Just Men!
• Lottery!
• CHiPs
• Caesar's Challenge
• The New Hollywood Squares
• Panic in the Skies!
• CHiPs '99
• CHiPs (2016)

References

External links

• Rick Rosner at the Internet Movie Database
• Rosner Television via IMDb
• DIRECTV Sat-Go conceived by Rosner