Tom tenowich biography

For one year, Mork and Mindy was arguably the most successful science fiction TV show ever made. The comedy about an alien and his human best friend turned Robin Williams into a global sensation.

How did this miracle happen, and why didn’t it last? To find out, I talked to the people who made the show.

I talked to six writers/producers of Mork and Mindy, plus the man who directed 59 of the show’s first 73 episodes, Howard Storm.

Note: This is the full-length “oral history”version of this article.

Tom tenowich biography

If you want to read the much shorter “tl;dr”version, click here. Also, these interviews have been slightly condensed and edited for clarity. In some cases, separate quotes have been combined.

The Birth of Mork

Originally, the spaceman Mork from Ork was just supposed to appear in a strange one-off episode of the 1950s-set sitcom Happy Days.

In the original cut of the episode, Mork is just a weird dream that Richi