David Milch

David Sanford Milch (born March 23, 1945) is an American writer and producer of television series. He has created several television shows, including ABC's NYPD Blue (1993–2005), co-created with Steven Bochco, and HBO's Deadwood (2004–2006, 2019).

Milch graduated with a B.A. summa cum laude from Yale University, where he won the Tinker Prize in English, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon chapter, along with future US President George W. Bush. Milch earned a Master of Fine Arts with distinction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.

To avoid the draft during the Vietnam War, Milch enrolled in Yale Law School, but he was expelled for allegedly shooting out a police car siren with a shotgun.

Milch worked as a writing teacher and lecturer in English literature at Yale. During his teaching career, he assisted Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks in the writing of several college textbooks on literature. Milch's poetry and fiction have been published in The Atlantic Monthly and the Southern Review.

In 1982, Milch wrote a script for Hill Street Blues, which became the episode "Trial by Fury". This began his career in television. He worked five seasons on Hill Street Blues as executive story editor and then as executive producer. Milch earned two Writers Guild Awards, a Humanitas prize, and a Primetime Emmy Award while working on that show.

Milch created NYPD Blue with Steven Bochco and served as executive producer of that series for seven seasons. He received three Primetime Emmy Awards during his time with the series. In a 1994 seminar on "Human Values in Entertainment Writing: The Challenges and the Pitfalls," Milch described his affinity for the show's character Detective Andy Sipowicz by noting, "I'm racist." He also recalled a writing workshop he led some years earlier, noting that "None of the Black writing was any good," adding: "Jews tend to do very well in this business . . . because Jews experience a typical emotional doubleness in relation to the dominant culture, which is that they are both inside and outside it . . . A Black person has to experience more anger and self-division in order to achieve the kind of emotional neutrality that you need to write about the culture." Milch explained in a later statement that "The seminar I gave was an attempt to describe the process of writing and not a statement of political or social values." In response to Milch's comments, David Mills (an American journalist, writer and TV producer) wrote a letter in which he challenged Milch's assumptions concerning Black writers. As a result, Milch hired Mills as a writer for NYPD Blue.

Milch co-created the patrol police drama Brooklyn South with Bochco, Bill Clark, and William M. Finkelstein in 1997 while still working on NYPD Blue. After NYPD Blue, Milch created a CBS series called Big Apple.

From 2004 to 2006, Milch produced Deadwood, a dramatic series for HBO. Milch served as creator, writer, and executive producer. The series received critical acclaim and garnered Milch two Primetime Emmy Award nominations for writing and producing. The series ended in 2006 after three seasons. There were plans for two feature-length movies to conclude the series, ultimately resulting in a single film released by HBO in 2019. Actor Ian McShane presented David Milch with the 2006 Outstanding Television Writer Award at the Austin Film Festival.