The Los Angeles nonprofit organization Young Storytellers has established a fund in honor of late television executive and producer Jamie Tarses. The fund will support the organization’s programs in L.A. public schools, helping volunteer mentors work personally with students to help them write original scripts for professional actors to perform on stage.
“Jamie understood that the most powerful thing you can tell a young person is that their ideas deserve to be taken seriously,” Jaylene Benggon Chung, managing director of Young Storytellers, said in a statement. “She built that belief into this organization, and it is still at the center of everything we do. Because of this fund, the kids who come through our doors will keep feeling her generosity, whether or not they ever learn her name.”
Tarses, a longtime TV producer, started her career at “Saturday Night Live,” working as a talent executive before becoming a casting director for Lorimar Productions. In 1987, she went to NBC, where she helped develop such hit shows as “Friends,” “Mad About You,” “Frasier” and “NewsRadio.”
1996 saw Tarses become the first woman to lead a network entertainment division as she became president of ABC Entertainment, where she produced such shows as “The Practice,” “Spin City” and “Sports Night.” Some of Tarses’ independent productions include “Mad Love,” “Happy Endings,” “Franklin & Bash” and “My Boys.”
“Jamie was never happier than when she was helping writers tell their stories,” her brother, Matt Tarses, co-creator of HBO’s “Rooster” and executive producer of “Bad Monkey,” said in a statement. “She had a gift for it and everyone who worked with her benefited tremendously from her guidance. In return, she bullied us into doing the same thing for the kids at Young Storytellers. Of course, it became one of the most joyful and rewarding things I’ve done, as she surely knew it would be. When we were trying to come up with ways to honor her memory, Young Storytellers was the obvious choice.”
Tarses died in 2021 after suffering from a stroke and a coma. The producer was a founding board member of Young Storytellers, joining in 2003, when the organization became an independent nonprofit. The Jamie Tarses Fund will be celebrated on Oct. 29 at the organization’s annual event, titled “The Biggest Show,” at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre.
