Stan Daniels, 72; TV writer and producer co-created “Taxi”

Stan Daniels, a co-creator of “Taxi” and a writer-producer of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” two television series that earned him eight Emmy awards, has died. He was 72.

Daniels, who had suffered from frontotemporal dementia for about five years, died of heart failure Friday at his longtime home in Encino, his family announced.

“I’ve never met anyone like him in comedy. He was really funny, great on structure and a thoughtful person,” James L. Brooks, a co-creator of “Taxi” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” told The Times on Wednesday. “He had it all -- big jokes, ideas for characters and almost a mathematical brain. He cracked Rubik’s Cube before anybody.”

An accomplished pianist, Daniels was working toward his doctorate in philosophy at Oxford University in 1961 when he veered into comedy writing.

Daniels had an “unusual background” for a comedy writer that helped him approach writing differently, said David Lloyd, a fellow writer on “Taxi” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

“The writers could be wandering in the desert, and he would organize the script and say, ‘This is the logic behind it.’ And anytime there was a joke that I’d wish I had written, it was always Stan’s,” Lloyd told The Times.

His longtime writing partner, Ed. Weinberger, recalled a scene Daniels wrote for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”: When an elderly woman meets news anchor Ted Baxter, she says, “Oh, I don’t watch television. I have a fireplace.”

“It was a joke that was more pointed about television than one would think on the surface,” Weinberger told The Times. “He had a great wit and was a wonderful partner.”

Daniels wrote for “The Dean Martin Show” and “The Bill Cosby Show” before joining “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” which ran from 1970 to 1977. He also co-created and wrote for the “Mary Tyler Moore” spinoff series “Phyllis” with Cloris Leachman.

With Brooks and David Davis, Daniels created “Taxi” and also served as the show’s executive producer, writing and directing the sitcom. The show debuted in 1978 and ran for five years.

Among his other television credits were the 1978 TV movie “Cindy,” about an African American Cinderella, that he wrote with Brooks; the 1974 series “Lily” with Brenda Vaccaro that he created with Weinberger; and the early 1990s sitcom “Roc” that starred Charles S. Dutton.

Still, Daniels told the Toronto Star in 1991 that musical theater was “his first love.”

He composed the music and lyrics for “So Long, 174th Street,” which had a short Broadway run in 1976.

He left behind nine unproduced musicals.

Stanley Edwin Daniels was born in 1934 in Toronto, the only child of Albert and Lillian, vaudevillians who later ran a movie house.

While earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in philosophy from the University of Toronto in the late 1950s, Daniels met his future wife, Alene Kamins. She had been a child star on Canadian radio.

He was studying at Oxford when he wrote and directed a musical revue featuring Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett that was produced at the Edinburgh Festival.

With the idea of a life in academia starting to make him miserable, he decided to jump into show business, Daniels told the Toronto Star in 1991. He became a comedy writer in London and then for the CBC in Toronto.

A chance meeting at his New York song publisher’s office with producer Greg Garrison led Daniels to move to Hollywood in 1968 to write for “Dean Martin Presents the Gold Diggers.”

In addition to Alene, his wife of 50 years, Daniels is survived by four children, writers Shelley, Dari and Alan, and Lawrence, a prosecutor for the state attorney general’s office; and two grandsons.

Services will be held at 2 p.m. today at Mount Sinai Memorial Park, 5950 Forest Lawn Drive, Los Angeles. Instead of flowers, the family requests donations to the Assn. for Frontotemporal Dementias, www.ftd-picks.org.

valerie.nelson@latimes.com