William Lucas Walker

William Lucas (Bill) Walker is an Emmy-winning television writer/producer. When the entertainment industry shut down during the Covid-19 pandemic, he founded the Who Am I? Mask Challenge, a grassroots PSA action aimed at spreading short videos shot by TV and film celebrities, Broadway stars, Olympic gold medalists and ordinary Americans, using social media to answer the question, "Why do you wear a mask?" (WhoAmIMaskChallenge.com) As a writer, Bill is best known for his work on the comedies FRASIER, WILL & GRACE and ROSEANNE, recognized as three of television's "101 Best Written Series" by the Writers Guild of America. He was also created THE CHRIS ISAAK SHOW, an hour comedy set in the music industry that ran for three seasons on Showtime. Bill recently sold the series TIME/BOLT to Amazon Studios. He is currently developing a new series with Imagine Television, as well as a family sitcom (WHO'S THE MOM) based on his popular Huffington Post humor blog "Spilled Milk." Bill has developed new series with Sony Television, Disney, Amazon Studios, Showtime, ABC Studios, Scott Free Productions, Phoenix Pictures and Imagine Television. He began his career as a writer and artistic director in the New York theater, where he collaborated with the Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright Lanford Wilson on the world premiere of the playwright's trio of one-acts, HALL OF NORTH AMERICAN FORESTS. After attending a performance, television writer Tom Fontana encouraged Bill to move west, and hired him for his TV writing assignment. Soon after moving to L.A. in 1991, Bill was invited to join the Warner Bros. Comedy Writers Workshop, which led to his first job as a staff writer on ABC's THE JACKIE THOMAS SHOW. He spent the next three years as a writer/producer on ROSEANNE, television's top comedy at the time. After ROSEANNE, he moved on to the hit sitcom FRASIER (where he won an Emmy Award), followed by CYBILL and WILL & GRACE, which he left to co-create Showtime's THE CHRIS ISAAK SHOW. When his daughter was born, Bill stepped away from full-time staff work to focus on fatherhood, while developing new series from home with ABC, Disney and Sony Television. After medical complications following his son's birth, Bill stepped away from television for a decade to focus on raising his children. In 2012 Arianna Huffington offered him his own humor column in THE HUFFINGTON POST to blog about his experiences as a Southern gay dad raising children in Hollywood, without a nanny. The first national column by an LGBT parent to appear in a major U.S. news publication, "Spilled Milk" debuted on the front page of the HUFFINGTON POST in February 2012 and quickly became a hit with readers. The column ran for four years, using humor to explore the intersection of marriage, politics and the changing face of the American family. Bill is currently developing a television comedy loosely based on his columns. (A link to selected "Spilled Milk" columns can be found on this site.) Bill has also written articles for Your Teen Magazine, Publishers Weekly, The Good Men Project and The New Civil Rights Movement. In early 2020, he revisited the writers room of the ROSEANNE/CONNERS reboot to cover the family comedy's successful resurrection after 20 years off the air. His article appears in the Fall 2020 issue of Written By, the official magazine of the Writers Guild of America. CAREER TRIVIA: Bill's Season 4 FRASIER episode "Are You Being Served?" drew the longest studio-audience laugh in the show's 11-year run. He also wrote prime-time's first same-sex wedding ("December Bride" on ROSEANNE). LIFE TRIVIA: Bill was born and raised in Clinton, South Carolina. Eagle Scout. AIDS activist with ACT UP New York. Met husband at church. Bakes cupcakes. Chews pencils. Does not have a Wikipedia entry.