Brandon Tartikoff
American television executive
Brandon Tartikoff (January 13, 1949 – August 27, 1997) was an American television executive who was head of the entertainment division of NBC from 1981 to 1991. He was credited with turning around NBC's low prime time reputation with several hit series: Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, Law & Order, ALF, Family Ties, The Cosby Show, Cheers, Seinfeld, The Golden Girls, Wings, Miami Vice, Knight Rider, The A-Team, Saved by the Bell, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, St. Elsewhere, Night Court and V.
Tartikoff also helped develop the 1984 sitcom Punky Brewster; he named the title character after a girl he had a crush on in school. He was also involved in the creation of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Beggars and Choosers.
Early life and education
Born to a Jewish family in Freeport, New York, Tartikoff was a graduate of Lawrenceville School and Yale University, where he contributed to campus humor magazine The Yale Record.
While attending Yale, Tartikoff worked as an account executive and sales manager for WNHC-TV in New Haven, Connecticut, as well as in Hartford, Connecticut. Tartikoff spent vacations in Los Angeles looking for a job in network television. After graduating from Yale, he took a series of jobs in advertising and local television, including WLS-TV in Chicago, Illinois.
Career
Tartikoff was hired as a program executive at ABC in 1976. One year later, he moved to NBC (after being hired by Dick Ebersol to direct comedy programming).
“Brandon Tartikoff” enters the record as american television executive. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Brandon, Tartikoff and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2923786. VIAF identifies the subject as 79411981. The Library of Congress control number is n92058511. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1949, 1997, 1981 and 1991.
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This entry incorporates text from “Brandon Tartikoff” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.