Since 1982 Tom Fontana has emerged as one of the most creative and influential forces in television. Fontana has been at the center of some of the most widely acclaimed and daring dramatic series in television history, including St. Elsewhere (1982-1988), Homicide: Life on the Street (1993-1999), and Oz (1997-2003).

     Growing up in Buffalo, New York, he enrolled at the State University of New York at Buffalo, graduating in 1973 with a degree in theater. In 1975 he moved to New York City to pursue a career as a playwright, and by the early 1980s he had secured a position as the playwright-in-residence at the Williamstown Theater. Fontana continues to be active in the theater: several of his plays have been produced in New York City, San Francisco, Cincinnati, and Buffalo. He recently served as the playwright-in-residence at The Writer's Theater in New York City.

     While at the Williamstown Theater, one of Fontana's plays, The Spectre Bridegroom, attracted the attention of television producer Bruce Paltrow, who was then producing The White Shadow at MTM Enterprises and was about to go into production on a new MTM show, St. Elsewhere. Paltrow offered Fontana a job as a writer on St. Elsewhere, where he stayed for the next six years. Like Hill Street Blues, another MTM series, St. Elsewhere was an ensemble drama with a large cast, set in a broken-down urban institution: in this case a hospital in a blighted section of Boston. St. Elsewhere and its writers became known not only for often stunningly moving stories, but also for a dark, irreverent wit and a willingness to play fast and loose with genre and character. Fontana's writing on the series earned him two Emmy Awards, a Humanitas Prize, and a Writers Guild Award.

     Following the departure of St. Elsewhere from the television schedule in 1988, Fontana teamed up with Paltrow for two more series: Tattingers (1988-89) and Home Fires (1992). Tattingers was initially an hour­ long comedy-drama set in a New York restaurant and filmed on location in Manhattan. The series was canceled in midseason, retooled, and brought back three months later as a half-hour sitcom called Nick and Hillary. The series was canceled permanently after only two weeks in the new format. Home Fires was a situation comedy that revolved around a middle-class suburban family who began each episode in therapy. Neither of these series caught on the way that St. Elsewhere did, and neither lasted into the next season.

     In 1992 Fontana received word from Barry Levin­ son that he was going to be developing a cop show and wanted to meet with Fontana about coming on board as an executive producer. Though skeptical of the possibility of improving on what Hill Street Blues had already accomplished in the police genre, Fontana agreed to meet with Levinson. Homicide: Life on the Street was conceived as an hour-long series based on the book, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, by David Simon, a crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun. Levinson told Fontana that Homicide would be a different kind of cop show: there would be no car chases or gun battles or other melodramatic mainstays of the genre. Thinking the whole project impossible, but looking for a challenge, Fontana signed onto the series. Homicide was indeed a different kind of cop show. It used shaky handheld cameras and jump cutting to add visual punch to a series that was more interested in the way the detectives thought and talked than how good they were with guns. With Fontana at the helm (developing story ideas, writing scripts, and having the final word on each episode), the series went on to become one of the most critically acclaimed dramas of the 1990s, gaining three Peabody Awards, and earning Fontana another Emmy Award for writing, along with two Writers Guild Awards.

     By the time Homicide was nearing the end of its network run, Fontana had emerged as one of the most powerful players in television drama. He had formed his own production company, Fatima Productions and, together with Levinson, had formed The Levinson/ Fontana Company; in 1997 they had production deals for new series at NBC, ABC, and HBO. Nevertheless, Fontana's network efforts in the waning days of Homicide proved to be less than totally successful. Three pilots (one for each of three major networks), ABC's Philly Heat, CBS's Firehouse, and NBC's The Prosecutors all failed to be picked up as series. Only The Beat, a cop series produced for UPN during the 1999-2000 season, and based on two young uniformed officers in New York City, made it on to the schedule. The Beat took the stylistic ticks of Homicide to the level of edgy excess, careening between fairly standard compositions shot on film, and grainy video footage with an abundance of canted angles shot with a wide-angle lens. The series failed to connect with the younger UPN audience and was unceremoniously removed from the network's lineup after only a handful of episodes.

     When it seemed Fontana's reign as one of television's premiere innovators was being threatened, HBO picked up his idea for a serial drama set inside a maximum-security prison. While HBO had already ventured into series programming with The Larry Sanders Show, Oz represented the cable network's first foray into the hour-long drama format. The series quickly earned a reputation as one of the most daring and provocative programs on television and helped launch HBO as perhaps the most important force in television at the turn of the century, setting the stage for HBO's blockbuster hit, The Sopranos. As the series' guiding force, Fontana wrote the entire first season (eight episodes) entirely on his own. Writing for HBO freed Fontana from the frustrating constraints imposed by network censors and allowed him to explore in grim and honest detail the kinds of stories that would likely emerge in a prison environment. Oz is known for its graphic violence, nudity, profanity, and its exceptional writing. While Oz has not received the same kind of industry accolades as its HBO brethren The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, the series and its creator helped open the door to a new era in television drama.

     This commitment to innovation most adequately describes Fontana's personality as a writer and producer. Perhaps because he is the beneficiary of the tutelage he received from Bruce Paltrow, Fontana is known for his generosity in helping to develop young writers. His willingness to engage the human condition in all of its toughness, oddity, darkness, and humor has placed him among the ranks of television's most important and innovative storytellers.