He co-created the sitcoms The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, and The Simpsons and directed the films Terms of Endearment (1983), Broadcast News (1987), and As Good as It Gets (1997).

Grant Tinker hired Brooks and producer Allan Burns at MTM Productions to create The Mary Tyler Moore Show in 1970.

Brooks and Burns then created two successful spin-offs from Mary Tyler Moore: Rhoda (a comedy) and Lou Grant (a drama).

His next project was the critically acclaimed film Terms of Endearment, which he produced, directed and wrote, winning an Academy Award for all three roles.

[2][3][4] His parents, Dorothy Helen (née Sheinheit) and Edward M. Brooks, were both salespeople (his mother sold children's clothes; his father furniture).

[4][13] He lists some of his influences as Sid Caesar, Jack Benny, Lenny Bruce, Mike Nichols and Elaine May,[12] as well as writers Mark Twain, Paddy Chayefsky and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

He moved to Los Angeles in 1965, to write for documentaries being produced by David L. Wolper, something he "still [hasn't] quite figured out how [he] got the guts to do,"[12] as his job at CBS was secure and well-paid.

[12] Brooks then went on to write episodes of That Girl,[12] The Andy Griffith Show[7] and My Three Sons before Sheldon Leonard hired him as a story editor on My Friend Tony.

Room 222 was the second series in American history to feature a black lead character, in this case high school teacher Pete Dixon played by Lloyd Haynes.

[2] The network felt the show was sensitive and so attempted to change the pilot story so that Dixon helped a white student rather than a black one, but Brooks prevented it.

[16] During its seven-year period it received high praise from critics and numerous Primetime Emmy Awards, including for three years in a row Outstanding Comedy Series.

[18][19] With Mary Tyler Moore going strong, Brooks produced and wrote the TV film Thursday's Game,[2] before creating the short-lived series Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers in 1974.

[22] Brooks left MTM Productions in 1978 and formed the John Charles Walters Company along with David Davis, Stan Daniels and Ed Weinberger.

[23] Brooks and Davis had been inspired by the article "Night-Shifting for the Hip Fleet" by Mark Jacobson, which appeared in the September 22, 1975 issue of New York magazine.

[25] Alex Simon of Venice Magazine described Brooks as "[bringing] realism to the previously overstated world of television comedy.

[26] He adapted the screenplay from a novel by Dan Wakefield into a film The Washington Post called "a good-humored, heartening update of traditional romantic comedy" unlike the "drab" novel.

[9] Brooks was fearful of the attention Oscar success would bring as he would be "deprived of a low profile", finding it "hard to work with the spotlight shining in your eyes."

After talking with network journalists at the 1984 Republican National Convention, Brooks realized the field had "changed so much since I had been near it", and so "did about a year and a half of solid research," into the industry.

[9] When he began writing the screenplay, Brooks felt he "didn't like any of the three [main] characters", but decided not to change them and after two months had reversed his original opinion.

While it was not unusual for Brooks to edit his films substantially after preview screenings, on this occasion he was "denied any privacy" because the media reported the negative reviews before its release and "it had to be good enough to counter all this bad publicity.

"[30] It was a commercial failure,[12] and Brooks attempted to produce a documentary about it four years later but was scuppered by failing to obtain the rights to Prince's song.

Brooks's directing style "drove [the cast] bats", especially Téa Leoni, with Cloris Leachman (who replaced an ill Anne Bancroft a month into filming) describing it as "free-falling.

While interviewing numerous women for hundreds of hours in his research for the film he also became interested in "the dilemmas of contemporary business executives, who are sometimes held accountable by the law for corporate behavior of which they may not even be aware."

[42] Patrick Goldstein wrote in the Los Angeles Times that "the characters were stick figures, the jokes were flat, the situations felt scarily insular."

[43] Richard Corliss of Time was more positive, writing "without being great, it's still the flat-out finest romantic comedy of the year," while "Brooks hasn't lost his gift for dreaming up heroes and heroines who worry amusingly.

[12] Brooks also helped Owen Wilson and Wes Anderson after their feature-length script and short film version of Bottle Rocket (1996) were brought to his attention.

[49] After the success of the shorts, the Fox Broadcasting Company in 1989 commissioned a series of half-hour episodes of the show, now called The Simpsons, which Brooks produced alongside Groening and Sam Simon.

He hoped Brooks would pull the episode because "articles began to appear in several newspapers around the country saying that [Groening] created The Critic", and remove his name from the credits.

[64] Brooks conceived the idea for, co-produced and co-wrote the Maggie-centric short film The Longest Daycare, which played in front of Ice Age: Continental Drift in 2012.

[70] In January 2017, Brooks stated in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that his career was now just focused staying with The Simpsons until the show ends and continuing to run into Steven Spielberg "in the market.