Peter Mehlman

Peter Mehlman is an American television writer and producer, best known for serving as a writer and producer on the TV series Seinfeld through nearly all of the show's nine-year run from 1989–98.

He also created the 1999 series It's Like, You Know... and produced the 2004 animated series Father of the Pride. Both were short-lived.

Peter Mehlman began his career as a sportswriter for The Washington Post. He made his first move from print journalism to television writing when, from 1982 to 1984, he wrote for and produced the television series SportsBeat with Howard Cosell. For the next five years he returned to freelance magazine writing in New York for magazines such as The New York Times Magazine, GQ and Esquire.

In 1989 he moved to Los Angeles and was offered the opportunity to write a script for Seinfeld by Larry David. As he had never written a script up to that point ("Pre-Seinfeld, I'd barely written any dialogue in my life"), Mehlman submitted instead a short humorous piece he had written for the New York Times Magazine. Jerry Seinfeld was so impressed by the piece that he gave Mehlman a writing assignment, out of which came the series' first freelance episode, "The Apartment." Mehlman was hired for the first full season of Seinfeld as a program consultant (1991–92) and, over the next six years, worked his way up to co-executive producer in the show's last season after Larry David's departure.

Describing the process of writing for Seinfeld and evaluating his own work on the show, Mehlman wrote in an article for Entertainment Weekly:

Seinfeld was the only show in which you came up with your own story lines or you were gone. There was no "writers' room." You wrote and rewrote your own scripts before kissing them off to Larry David and Jerry so they could dose it with magic. I was ready to say I did bad work on "The Visa", better on "The Sponge", really good on "The Implant". I was ready to argue that my episodes showed signs of a sensibility: A bunch dealt with radically changing one's appearance; a clump with contraception; a batch had people trying to be someone else; almost all had friends drastically at cross-purposes. My story lines were truly "about nothing." (Except when they weren't: It took me weeks to realize that my friend's experience with a valet parker's BO would make a funny episode. Too broad of an idea for me to see.).

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