Commentary: Obits, Appreciations

From the Times-Picayune, Reprinted with permission. David Simon, co-creator of HBO’s “Treme,” first worked with David Mills, a “Treme” writer and co-executive producer who died Tuesday (March 30) at age 48, when they both wrote for the student newspaper at the University of Maryland.  With “Treme” aiming for an April 11 premiere on HBO and the production aiming to wrap its 10-episode first season in late April, Simon wrote his friend’s obituary Wednesday.  It was distributed, unsigned, by the network.  Here’s the complete text: David E. Mills, an Emmy-award winning television writer who worked on dramas as varied as “Homicide,” “NYPD Blue,” “E.R.” and “The Wire,” died suddenly Tuesday after collapsing on the New Orleans set of his new HBO drama, “Treme.” He was 48. A former journalist who worked for the Washington Post, the Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal, Mills was on the set of the post-Katrina drama as it filmed a scene at Café du Monde in the French Quarter when...

Behind the scenes, Bob Colesberry was a showbiz giant Appreciation, from the Baltimore Sun, Feb. 15, 2004 Reprinted with permission  It was a shotgun wedding of sorts, with an HBO executive playing pastor. I was there to get a book that I had written, an account of a year on a Baltimore drug corner, made into television. I had another writer with me, a trusted college friend with experience in episodic drama. David Mills had worked a few years on NYPD Blue, just as I had a couple years under Tom Fontana on Homicide. And we had already hired a line producer who would help us put film in the can. So why was I being ushered to this New York office to meet another producer? Some studio type named Colesberry. A film producer, no less, from the world of big-budget features where everyone had a producer title, whether they did any work or not. He would probably ask for crane shots and try to rewrite scripts and screw up the casting and blow a hole in the budget. “Don’t commit to...