Dusty Kay, Writer and Producer on ‘Entourage’ and ‘Roseanne,’ Dies at 69

Dusty Kay, a writer and Emmy-nominated producer with credits including Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Roseanne and Entourage, has died. He was 69.

Kay died April 10 in Summerlin, Nevada, after an undescribed brief illness, Bill Nuss, his friend and longtime collaborator, announced. The pair authored the book for a musical based on The Honeymooners that premiered in 2017 at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey.

Kay also created the ABC series Once a Hero, starring Robert Forster, Milo O’Shea, Caitlin Clarke and Jeff Lester. The show, about a comic book hero, Captain Justice (Lester), who crosses over from the fictional world to fight crime in the real world, only to discover he’s lost his superpowers, aired seven episodes in 1997.

He served as a co-supervising producer on five episodes of ABC’s Lois & Clark in 1993, wrote and produced on the seventh season of ABC’s Roseanne in 1994-95 and was a supervising producer and writer on HBO’s Entourage during its fourth season (2007).

He shared an Emmy nom for outstanding comedy series for his work on Entourage in 2008.

Eugene Lawrence Kay was born in the Bronx in October 1954 and raised in nearby Yonkers and Spring Valley. He attended Northwestern University, where he took the name Dusty in honor of his favorite actor, Dustin Hoffman.

In college, he and Nuss developed the Mee-Ow Show, an improv show that has run for 50 years and counting (he was celebrated for that achievement last month at Northwestern). It served as a breeding ground for writers, directors, creators, showrunners and actors including Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ana Gasteyer and Seth Meyers.

Kay later wrote and produced three telefilms: 1987’s Triplecross, starring Ted Wass and Markie Post; 1989’s Mick and Frankie, starring Ed Marinaro and Forster; and 1996’s Cutty Whitman, starring James Remar and Richard Libertini. 

He also wrote for shows including Good Times, James at 16, Eight Is Enough, Early Edition, the 2002 reboot of The Twilight Zone and pilots that never made it to air, something “he was still grousing about at the time of his death,” Nuss wrote in an email.

And he acted on occasion, appearing in such films as Hacks (1997), The Secret Life of Girls (1999) and Gun Shy (2000).

Kay grew up rooting for the Pittsburgh Pirates and often said the team’s decades of losing prepared him “for his lucrative but often frustrating 45-year career in television,” Nuss wrote, adding that he “never hid the contempt he felt toward most studio and network executives.”

Kay was a Rotisserie baseball commissioner for 30 years in a fantasy league with industry people. The league was recently renamed in his honor.

Survivors include his cousins, Ira, Laura, Sheri, Bernard and Felicia, and his second cousins, Roxanne, Jesse and Jenna.

Donations in his honor can be made to Chabad of Westwood.