Earl Barret

Earl Barret died of natural causes at his home in Sherman Oaks, California, on Thursday 22 October 2026, aged 94. His death was announced a week later by his daughter J.K. Barret, who said he was a lifelong learner with a keen, curious mind and a gift for impeccable comic timing. Obituaries appeared in Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter on 29 October 2026. Funeral arrangements were not made public.

Earl Barret was born on 17 October 1932 in Canton, Ohio, during the Great Depression. He was the only child of Aurel and Mary Barret, who owned a confectionery store; his memoir describes his father as a Romanian chauffeur and his mother as a Hungarian American waitress. They gave him tap dancing and violin lessons and later moved the family to Los Angeles, hoping he would break into films. He graduated from Hollywood High School and Los Angeles City College.

Barret first pursued acting. He changed direction after joining a free television writing class that Robert C. Dennis, a writer on Perry Mason and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, taught every Wednesday night. His mother had been the first in the family to attend it.

Barret's first television credits came in 1961, on Sea Hunt, Hawaiian Eye and Ripcord. He wrote an episode of My Favorite Martian in 1963 and went on to My Three Sons, My Mother the Car, O.K. Crackerby!, Get Smart, The Andy Griffith Show, Julia, I Spy and The Wild Wild West, several of them with Robert C. Dennis. He wrote episodes in the first and third seasons of Bewitched. For Batman, when the producers wanted new villains, he and Dennis created King Tut, played by Victor Buono, and wrote the four episodes in which he first appeared in 1966.

He became story editor on the CBS comedy The Governor and J.J. (1969 to 1970), where he and the show's co-creator Arne Sultan began writing together; Barret also directed an episode. The partners went on to The Partners, The Sandy Duncan Show, Holmes and Yoyo, The New Odd Couple and the Canadian series Check It Out. In the 1970s Barret also wrote for Love, American Style, The Bob Newhart Show, Sanford and Son and Welcome Back, Kotter.

In 1980 Barret and Sultan developed Too Close for Comfort, based on Brian Cooke's British sitcom Keep It in the Family. It starred Ted Knight as Henry Rush, a cartoonist living in San Francisco with his wife and two adult daughters, and ran for six seasons, first on ABC and then in syndication, later as The Ted Knight Show, until 1987. Barret was executive producer and directed 13 episodes. With Sultan he also wrote the stage comedy Wife Begins at 40, later a 1988 BBC television film, and both were credited writers and executive producers of the 1989 film See No Evil, Hear No Evil. In all he wrote for 33 television series.

Barret was married to Barbara Barnett Barret. He had a son, John, and daughters J.K. and Lisa; Lisa died before him. He had five grandsons. In 2010 he published Eden Was on a Hollywood Hill, a book about his parents' marriage after a one-week courtship and their pursuit of the American Dream through the Depression, the Second World War and the move to Hollywood.

Barret's career spans much of the classic era of American television comedy, from Bewitched and Get Smart to the ensemble sitcoms of the 1970s. Too Close for Comfort remained a staple of syndication, and King Tut, the character he co-created, became one of the best remembered villains of the 1960s Batman series.