David M. Stern

David Michael Stern is an American television screenwriter. Among his first work in television was writing episodes of The Wonder Years in the late 1980s. He then proceeded to write several episodes of The Simpsons in the 1990s. In 2010, he developed the animated television series Ugly Americans. Stern is the younger brother of actor Daniel Stern, who narrated and directed The Wonder Years, and was later known for his role as Marv Murchins in the first two Home Alone films.

Career Early work Stern worked as a production assistant on the 1988 film Mystic Pizza. In a 2010 interview with TV.com, he revealed: "That was one of my first gigs in LA. I was shocked they gave me a credit because I lasted a week and then got canned. I was a runner, and they told me to go pick up this producer at San Vicente and something, and it turns out there are two San Vicentes in Los Angeles, and I had gone to the wrong one. They gave the assignment of picking up the most important producer on the movie to a guy who had just arrived in LA two weeks before."

Stern got his writing break on the television comedy-drama The Wonder Years, where he was an executive story consultant

"Homer Alone" (1992), which aired during the show's third season, was one of Stern's episodes that focused on Marge. At the time, he had noticed that most of the writers were pitching stories about Bart and Homer, and he thought a "deeper vein of comedy" could be reached by having Marge suffer from a nervous breakdown. During the show's fourth season, Stern wrote the episode "Selma's Choice" (1993), in which Selma decides she wants a baby. He wanted to go back to a "Patty and Selma episode" because he enjoyed "Principal Charming" and thought it was important to "keep these characters alive." In 1999, Stern was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award in the "Outstanding Animated Program (for Programming Less Than One Hour)" category for writing the season ten episode "Viva Ned Flanders", but lost to the episode "And They Call It Bobby Love" of King of the Hill. Stern's last writing credit to date on The Simpsons was the season twenty-eight episode "Kamp Krustier" (2017).

Further work Stern was co-executive producer for the comedy drama detective television series Monk in 2002, and the sitcom Oliver Beene in 2004. In 2010, Stern developed the animated television series Ugly Americans that airs on Comedy Central and is based on a web series called 5ON. The series revolves around a social worker employed by the Department of Integration in an alternate reality version of New York City inhabited by monsters and other creatures. He has also noted that on the show, "We [the staff] have a lot of horror comedy elements that I don't see anywhere else. I wrote for The Simpsons for a few years, and Treehouse of Horror was always the highlight of the year, but I always sort of wanted more of that. But because of the structure of The Simpsons, it wasn't really possible, being it was so specifically based on this grounded family." and David M. Stern helped the writers get the idioms and the wording of the parody right.