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Peter Engel, ‘Saved by the Bell’ Producer, Dies at 88
He shepherded the millennial touchstone series and a host of other teen sitcoms during his career.

Peter Engel, who executive produced Saved by the Bell and a host of other teen sitcoms for NBC, died Tuesday at his home in Santa Monica, his son Stephen David Engel announced. He was 88.

The show that became Saved by the Bell began life as Good Morning, Miss Bliss on Disney Channel. The series at the time focused on Hayley Mills, who played the title character, and her students at an Indianapolis junior high school. That show lasted only one season, but after a retooling (and change in setting to Southern California), the NBC-produced show was relaunched as Saved by the Bell and became both a staple of NBC’s Saturday lineup from 1989-93 and a touchstone show for Gen X and millennial viewers.

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The show helped launch the careers of its young cast — Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Tiffani Thiessen, Mario Lopez, Elizabeth Berkley, Dustin Diamond and Lark Voorhies — and spawned a primetime spinoff subtitled The College Years as well as Saved by the Bell: The New Class, which ran from 1993-2000 as a Saturday morning show. Engel was also an executive producer of Peacock’s Saved by the Bell update, which ran for two seasons in 2020 and ’21.

Engel’s eponymous production company went on to supply NBC with a host of other teen-oriented sitcoms, including California Dreams, USA High, Malibu, CA, City Guys and Hang Time, among others. Engel wrote dozens of episodes of those shows. He also was an executive producer of NBC’s stand-up comedy competition Last Comic Standing.

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Born in Manhattan in 1936, Engel graduated from New York University and began his career in the industry as an NBC page at 30 Rock. His first credit as an executive producer was on the 1971 CBS variety series The Ice Palace; he also exec produced the NBC daytime drama How to Survive a Marriage in 1974-75.

Over his career, Engel executive produced more than a thousand episodes of television, the great majority of them over his long partnership with NBC. He earned a Daytime Emmy nomination as a producer of Saved by the Bell: The New Class in 2000 and and a primetime Emmy nod for Last Comic Standing in 2004. He was inducted into the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ Gold Circle for children’s and family programming, which recognizes “distinguished service within the industry,” in 2023.

Engel published a memoir, I Was Saved by the Bell: Stories of Life, Love, and Dreams that Do Come True, in 2016.

He is survived by his children, Lauren, Joshua and Stephen David, and by his grandchild, Ezra Alhadeff.