Ken Levine (scénariste)

Origins and early life

Ken Levine was born on 14 February 1950 and grew up Jewish in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, an upbringing he wrote about at length in his memoir The Me Generation...

Work and career

By Me, which describes what it was for middle-class Jewish boys of the Valley to leave the tribe they were born into for the youth culture of the 1960s. He returns to it constantly on his long-running blog, where he has written about his bar mitzvah, about his grandparents coming over from Europe and Russia, and about the antisemitism his own son met at school. With his writing partner David Isaacs he has written more than two hundred episodes of American television, for M*A*S*H, Cheers, Frasier, Wings, Everybody Loves Raymond, Becker and Dharma and Greg, and the two created the series Almost Perfect.

They wrote Dancin' Homer for the second season of The Simpsons, the episode in which Homer becomes a baseball mascot, which drew on the other half of Levine's working life: he spent years as a professional play-by-play announcer, calling major league games for the Baltimore Orioles, the Seattle Mariners and the San Diego Padres. He has won an Emmy for Cheers, directed television comedy, and written plays.