Overview
With hundreds of hours of produced film and television credits, CNN correspondent-turned- writer-producer-director Bryce Zabel has most recently scripted a trio of new mini-series which aired in the U.S. market and were distributed worldwide. They include the medical thriller
Pandemic (2007, Hallmark), the pirate adventure
Blackbeard (2006, Hallmark), and the disaster epic
The Poseidon Adventure (2005, NBC).
In television, Zabel was showrunner (creator or developer/producer/writer) on the UFO-conspiracy series
Dark Skies from 1996-1997,
The Crow: Stairway to Heaven from 1998-1999 and the Fox African-American superhero series
M.A.N.T.I.S. from 1994-1995. He also wrote and produced on
The New Adventures of Superman (1993-1994), and
The Fifth Corner (1992).
As a feature writer, Zabel has received writing credit on
The Lost Empire and
Annihilation. He also wrote the first Sci-Fi Channel original film,
Office Denial.
A long-time member of the Directors Guild of America, he first worked as a director on the Los Angeles magazine series "Eye on LA" and
The Making of an Adventure. He is set to make his feature directorial debut in 2009 on
Let's Do It, a comedy about the first student film ever produced, back in 1929.
As an actor, he appeared as a reporter in the
Dark Skies episode "The Warren Omission", and as a priest in the
Lois & Clark episode, "All Shook Up".
In 2001, Zabel became the first writer/producer to be elected as Chairman and CEO of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, since his boyhood idol Rod Serling. Elected the month before 9/11, he took office at a time when he was forced to twice postpone the 53rd Primetime Emmy Awards. In 2006, he was interviewed about this decision by the Dallas-based Media Orchard :
"In 2001, the Emmys were scheduled for September 16th. So we cancelled them. What else could we do? Five days after 9/11 nobody was going to be in a self-congratulatory mood to celebrate on red carpets with little gold statues when thousands had died so tragically. We re-scheduled for October 7. Incredibly, that's the day the bombing campaign in Afghanistan began. We were forced to cancel again. I went out that morning before some 200 TV cameras with Les Moonves of CBS and we talked to the media about all this. I got a call from a friend who said, "Dude, you've been on TV more this weekend than the president." It was an amazing media carpet ride -- appearances on everything from "Politically Incorrect" to "The Today Show." Anyway, we tried again on November 4 and actually did the show. We were up against the seventh game of an exciting World Series but who cared?"
While leading the TV Academy the next year, he led the negotiations that resulted in the Emmy telecast license fee being increased by 250 percent. He left office in 2003, saying his one term was so eventful it felt like two.
Current work
Zabel is currently the lead writer and a producer on
Animal Armageddon, an eight-part non-fiction miniseries for Animal Planet. It deals with mass extinction events.
The latest screenplay written by Bryce and Jackie Zabel,
Miles From Nowhere completed filming in Los Angeles in the summer of 2008. It is the story of a high school athlete who decides to try for a sub-four-minute mile to deal with the death of a friend. The film stars Treat Williams.
Zabel has also created a film review site, Movie Smackdown, that reviews two related films in competition against each other. The slogan is "Two Films - One Review - No Holds Barred."
Awards and nominations
In 2008, Zabel's Hallmark miniseries
Pandemic (co-written with Jackie Zabel) won the Writers Guild of America award in the Original Long Form category. It was the third WGA award Zabel has been nominated for and his first win. Previously, he was nominated for Episodic Drama (
L.A. Law; "Justice Swerved") and Original Long Form (
Dark Skies; "The Awakening"). His other nominations were shared with David E. Kelley and Brent V. Friedman. Zabel was also nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe award for Best Television Episode (
L.A. Law; "Justice Swerved") in 1991. The nomination was shared with David E. Kelley.
Education
Zabel attended high school in Hillsboro, Oregon. He earned a BA degree in broadcast journalism at the University of Oregon in Eugene. After graduation, Zabel stayed in Eugene and worked at television station KVAL-TV and radio station KZEL-FM. He taught as an adjunct professor of a graduate level class on producing at University of Southern California from 2006-2007.
