Anne Beatts dies: Original SNL writer and creator of Square Pegs was 74

Deadline

Original Saturday Night Live cast member Laraine Newman announced the news of Beatts' death on Twitter. "Our Anne- an OG SNL writer passed away yesterday," she tweeted. No further details were released. Beatts won an Emmy and was nominated five times for her work on SNL. "Along with her writing partner Rosie Shuster, Beatts created such foundational SNL characters as Todd and Lisa (played by Bill Murray and Gilda Radnor), Laraine Newman’s Shirley Temple-like Child Psychiatrist, the lecherous Uncle Roy (Buck Henry) and two of Dan Aykroyd’s greatest hits: the cartoonishly sleazy salesman Irwin Mainway and Fred Garvin, the unlikely male prostitute," says Deadline's Greg Evans. Beatts also wrote the 1979 one-woman show Gilda Radnor – Live. Beatts went on to create the one-season 1982-1983 cult CBS teen sitcom Square Pegs, starring Sarah Jessica Parker and Jami Gertz. In a 2020 Vulture essay titled, "Anne Beatts Was Always More Interesting Than John Hughes," Jen Chaney wrote: "In conversations about portraits of teenage life from the 1980s, the first name that invariably gets mentioned is John Hughes. That makes sense. The filmmaker’s coming-of-age canon — which includes Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off — was enormously influential and is still actively referenced in today’s high-school movies and TV shows. But there’s another name that doesn’t come up nearly as often and definitely should: Anne Beatts." As Chaney points out, "Square Pegs arrived on TV a month after Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High hit theaters, and it aired its final episode more than a year before Hughes’s Sixteen Candles was released. Those and other more obvious touchstones of the era have overshadowed the importance of the show she created. But whether they realize it or not, every teen series and movie that followed Square Pegs owes it, and Anne Beatts, a debt of total gratitude. Totally."