The Writers Guild of America West will bestow its annual television achievement award on Everybody Hates Chris and The Ranch writer and producer Don Reo, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.
The prolific creative, who also created Blossom and co-created My Wife & Kids, will receive the union’s Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for Television Writing Achievement at its awards ceremony in Los Angeles on Sunday, March 8.
Blossom star Mayim Bialik will present the award to Reo at the ceremony, which will take place at the JW Marriott L.A. Live Los Angeles and will be livestreamed on YouTube.
“I am touched and honored to receive this wonderful award,” Reo said in a statement. “It gives me hope for the future.”
Born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1946, Reo entered his first television writers room in the late ’60s after establishing himself as a comic writer for standup comedians. Early jobs included writing for classic programs like Norman Lear’s All in the Family and Sanford & Son as well as The Mary Tyler Moore Show and M*A*S*H. In the 1980s he dipped into the world of Blanche Devereaux’s Miami residence by writing on Golden Girls and its spinoff Empty Nest.
Later in his career, Reo took on major creative and leadership roles on high-profile sitcoms. In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s he created Heartland, Lenny, Blossom and Pearl. He didn’t let up in the 2000s, co-creating and executive producing My Wife & Kids, which starred Damon Wayans and ran for five seasons. He re-teamed with Wayans by co-creating the series Rodney with him and Ric Swartzlander, a sitcom that ran for two seasons.
Reo later wrote on and executive produced the autobiographical Chris Rock series Everybody Hates Chris. He executive produced, and later was co-showrunner of, Two and a Half Men. And he transitioned to the streaming era with the 2016 release of The Ranch, the Netflix series starring Ashton Kutcher, Danny Masterson and Sam Elliott.
The WGA West has previously bestowed its Paddy Chayefsky award on members like Vince Gilligan, Shonda Rhimes, David Chase and Aaron Sorkin.
The WGA’s L.A. awards show will be executive produced by Benn Fleishman and Augie Max Vargas, while Deborah Byrd will serve as talent producer.