Ed Friendly, a producer who brokered the deal that brought “Laugh-In” to television and who created the series “Little House on the Prairie” after noticing his daughter reading the books, has died. He was 85.
Mr. Friendly died of cancer Sunday at his home in Rancho Santa Fe, said Warren Cowan, his longtime publicist and friend.
In 1967, Mr. Friendly left his job as NBC’s vice president of special programs in New York and moved to Los Angeles to produce specials through an independent company he formed with George Schlatter.
One of the first shows his company produced was “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.” The comedy variety show was an overnight sensation when it debuted in 1968.
Mr. Friendly often said his “biggest break” in television was marrying his first wife, Natalie, who nagged him to buy the TV rights to the “Little House” books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. But he didn’t act on her advice until he spotted his teenage daughter reading the books.
He hid the books inside a magazine so no one would see him reading them on a plane trip, and after landing in New York, “the first thing I did was get on a phone and call to find out who owned the rights to the books,” Mr. Friendly told the Columbus Dispatch of Ohio in 2005.
The series ran on NBC from 1974 to 1983.
