Andrew Orenstein
Lecturer
Four days after graduating from the University of Western Ontario in 1992, Andrew Orenstein left his native Canada and headed to Hollywood. Since that time, he has written and/or produced more than 500 episodes of television, spanning many genres, from sketch comedy to half-hour sitcoms to one-hour dramas. His first break came when he was hired as one of the original staff writers on the hit NBC series 3rd Rock from the Sun. He stayed for 100 episodes, rising to the rank of producer. He then joined the writing staff of Fox’s Malcolm in the Middle, where he spent five years as a co-executive producer. He wrote for the short-lived CBS medical drama Dr. Vegas, starring Rob Lowe and Amy Adams, before becoming a co-executive producer on Chris Rock’s autobiographical CW series Everybody Hates Chris.
In 2012, he returned to Canada when Package Deal, a multicamera sitcom he created based on his life, was picked up to series by City TV/Hulu, where it ran for two seasons. He ran Just Add Magic for Amazon TV, and developed the spinoff Just Add Magic: Mystery City. Most recently he co-created the single camera children’s mystery Ghostwriter, for Apple TV+.
