Rick Rosner
Richard "Rick" Rosner (born c. 1941) is an American television producer best known for creating the television show CHiPs. Rosner later developed a portable satellite television in partnership with DirecTV.
Life and career
Rosner's father, Alfred D. Rosner sold insurance. 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.
After getting his start writing episodic television, Rosner became a producer on The Mike Douglas Show, where he introduced on-location episodes. He was an executive with Warner Bros. Inc. before NBC named him its Vice President of Variety Programming in 1975.
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.
