After that Merrill Markoe got a job on Mary Tyler Moore's short lived and ill-conceived attempt to star in her own variety show on CBS. During those few strange months, she believes she actually witnessed a choreographed production number being taped in which a young David Letterman and an even younger Michael Keaton were forced to sing and dance to the Village People song Macho Man. Sometimes, late at night, when she is having trouble sleeping, she wonders if this could have been a feverish hallucination. 

The Show Years
It was during this period that she began writing and creating shows with David Letterman, who she knew from the Comedy Store in the late seventies. Together Merrill Markoe and Mr. Letterman eventually designed the beloved NBC talk show, Late Night with David Letterman, But first there was an Emmy award winning NBC day time talk show, live from New York City every morning at 10 a.m... which had, among it's highlights, an episode during which the studio caught fire, live on network TV, due to a shower of flammable, igniting rose petals meant to enhance the fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration of an obscure couple from Long Island. Not so surprisingly, the show only lasted 4 months. 

After five or six years of writing and producing what seemed like thousands of individual units of late night comedy and winning a bunch of Emmys for “Late Night with David Letterman,” Merrill Markoe felt that she had plumbed the depths of her ability to invent off-beat, comedic ideas for acerbic witty white hosts in suits. Haunted by the fear that the creation of Stupid Pet Tricks was going to be the only thing that would appear in her obituary should she die right then, Merrill Markoe decided to abandon the talk show game entirely unless she herself had something she needed to plug.

Although she was now offered an assortment of presumably high paying jobs producing talk shows for other people, Merrill Markoe decided to try and reconnect with her own voice by taking a job in local news at Channel 13 in Los Angeles where she wrote, produced and appeared in bi-weekly remote segments that were called, oddly enough, “Merrill’s L.A.”

After only a few months on the air covering events like the national auditions for Rocker Barbie and the opening of Mickey Rooney’s Yogurt Parlor, she was proud to be singled out in a Los Angeles Magazine review as “the most disturbing life style reporter to hit the tube in some time.”

In the years that followed, Merrill Markoe continued to work as an on-air reporter for a number of magazine shows, including Michael Moore’s TV Nation and HBO’s satirical hit ‘Not Necessarily the News’ while also writing freelance for numerous print publications (Rolling Stone, Time, New York Woman, The New York Times and Los Angles Times, etc.) and television shows (Newhart, Moonlighting, Sex in the City). The highlight of this period was the production of a number of obscure but well reviewed cable TV specials and pilots which Merrill Markoe wrote, directed and starred in, either by herself or with beloved American icons such as Harry Shearer and Richard Rosen. She also completed scripts for a number of movies, at least one of which has been on the infuriating verge of being produced for the last twenty (count em; TWENTY) years.

So now, Merrill Markoe has authored three books of humorous essays and the novels It’s My F---ing Birthday and What the Dogs Have Taught Me which have been all published by Villard Books/Random House Publishing Group. She has also co-authored with Andy Prieboy the novel The Psycho Ex Game. Her newest novel is Walking in Circles Before Lying Down. 

www.merrillmarkoe.com