David M. Stern

David M. Stern
Stern in Ithaca, New York, in Feb. 2016
Occupation	Screenwriter
Known for	The Wonder Years, The Simpsons, and Ugly Americans
Relatives	Daniel 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 brother of actor Daniel Stern.

Stern worked as a production assistant on the film 1988 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 and wrote eight episodes from 1988 to 1990. He has said in an interview that "I was struggling when I got my break on The Wonder Years; I like to remember it all happening like, "Cut to the next scene." There's an awful lot of blood and sweat in there, me doing massive rewrites on drafts of Wonder Years scripts on a typewriter, with less time than I've ever had in my life. I conveniently forget all that." Stern was nominated for a 1989 Primetime Emmy Award in the "Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series" category for writing the episode "Loosiers" but lost to Diane English of Murphy Brown. He was also nominated for a Humanitas Prize in the "30 Minute Category" for writing the episode "The Powers That Be".