Nancylee Myatt, a writer and Emmy-winning producer with credits including Night Court, The 5 Mrs. Buchanans, Living Single and lots of shows about teens, has died. She was 68.
Myatt chose to “end her life peacefully and with dignity” in Basel, Switzerland, on Sept. 23 — her birthday — her wife and writing partner, Paige Williams Bernhardt, announced. She had been diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment in 2021 and with Alzheimer’s disease in 2023.
Early in her career, Myatt was the only female writer on the staff of The Powers That Be, a 1992-93 political comedy for the USA Network that was created by David Crane and Marta Kauffman and executive produced by her mentor, Norman Lear.
Myatt later launched and served as a co-executive producer, showrunner, writer and director on the first two seasons (2005-06) of South of Nowhere for Nickelodeon’s Noggin network.
For the original Night Court on NBC, she wrote for the last two seasons of its nine-season run (1990-92), including the series finale.
She also wrote and produced for the 1994-95 CBS comedy The 5 Mrs. Buchanans, starring Judith Ivey and Eileen Heckart, and for the fifth season (1997-98) of the Fox sitcom Living Single, starring Queen Latifah, Kim Coles and Erika Alexander (she won an NAACP award for her work on the latter).
Myatt created and produced the 1997 UPN boarding school-set sitcom Social Studies, starring Julia Duffy, for Dolly Parton’s Sandollar Productions. And from 1999-2002, she wrote and/or produced for the Disney animated kids series Recess, Lloyd in Space and Teacher’s Pet, winning a Daytime Emmy in 2001 for that last one.
A member of the Cherokee tribe in Oklahoma, Myatt earned a degree in Fine Arts from the University of California at Irvine.
She wrote the plays Two on the Aisle for Murder, Slumber Party, Afterlife, Nothing So Simple as Love and Wet Paint, all of which were produced in Los Angeles, before she joined the writers workshop program at Warner Bros., graduating in 1990.
She also worked on such ’90s network series as Life With Roger, starring Mike O’Malley; Cleghorne!, starring Ellen Cleghorne; and Muddling Through, starring Stephanie Hodge and Jennifer Aniston.
In 2004, Myatt wrote, produced and ran a cop show pilot set in New Orleans about two women, partners in work and life, called Nikki & Nora. It was not picked up, but the pilot was leaked online, where it found a dedicated fan base and led to a 2013 web series, Nikki & Nora: The N&N Files.
The pilot also birthed a partnership with Barry Sonnenfeld, and the two created a sci-fi dramedy pilot, Trackers, for Sony TV.
More recently, she co-wrote a pilot for ABC Family called Cupidity, starring Ralph Macchio.
She and Williams Bernhardt moved to Nikki & Nora‘s home of New Orleans in 2010. “When I’m blocked or need to work something out,” she said in a 2017 interview, “I walk in the neighborhoods, cemeteries, Audubon Park or the French Quarter. It’s all visually inspiring, and if you sit in a bar long enough in this city, someone will always tell you an amazing story.”
Donations in her memory can be made to the Louisiana chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association or to the National Spay Alliance Foundation (NSAF Savannah).
