‘Law & Order’ and ‘The Wire’ Veteran Dies After ‘Brief Illness’: Eric Overmyer Was 74

Eric Overmyer, whose storied career as a writer/producer included work on Law & Order, The Wire, Bosch and Bosch: Legacy, has died. He was 74.

The Emmy-nominated TV veteran died on Monday after a brief illness, Deadline reported on Wednesday.

“Not only was Eric a superbly talented writer, he was just one of those people everyone loved,” Law & Order creator Dick Wolf told the outlet in a statement. “We are all going to miss him.”

Overmyer’s career began as a writer for St. Elsewhere, but after a string of other short-term television writing jobs, he found a home on NBC’s Homicide: Life on the Street in 1996. Overmyer would go on to work on the series for four years, through its seventh and final season, before subsequently co-writing and executive producing Homicide: The Movie.

From the world of Homicide, Overmyer was brought in on Season 4 of his friend and fellow writer/producer David Simon’s critically-acclaimed HBO series The Wire in 2006. The two would next go on to co-create and executive produce the post-Hurricane Katrina drama Treme, which aired from 2010 to 2014, for HBO.

Most recently, Overmyer developed Prime Video’s long-running Bosch adaptation for the streamer, serving as executive producer and showrunner on the Titus Welliver-led crime drama from 2014 to 2021. He also co-created and executive produced the spinoff series Bosch: Legacy, which ran from 2022 to 2025.

His other TV credits include stints on NBC’s Law & Order, which he also executive produced, as well as Law & Order: SVU, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, and HBO’s Boardwalk Empire. Overmyer is also credited as a co-writer on the 1998 ABC movie Rear Window and the 2016 Nat Geo miniseries Saints & Strangers.

Overmyer was nominated for four Emmy Awards throughout his career, as well as for five WGA Awards, one of which he won in 2016 for Saints & Strangers.

In addition to his work on television, Overmyer had another career as a playwright for off-Broadway and regional theater productions, including On the Verge; or, The Geography of Yearning (1985), In a Pig’s Valise (1989), Mi Vida Loca (1990), The Heliotrope Bouquet by Scott Joplin and Louis Chauvin (1993) and Dark Rapture (1996).