David Zabel

David Breitel Zabel is an American television producer and writer. He has worked extensively on ER, becoming an executive producer and the series' showrunner. He has won a Humanitas Prize for his writing for ER. He was also the showrunner/executive producer of the PBS series Mercy Street. Early life Zabel was raised in New York City. He attended Princeton University and New York University's Graduate Acting Program at the Tisch School of the Arts. Career Zabel began his scriptwriting career with episodes for JAG and Star Trek: Voyager. He then became the story editor for the first season of Dark Angel in 2000 while continuing to write teleplays. In 2001, Zabel joined the crew of ER as an executive story editor and was promoted to co-executive producer later that season. He was made executive producer partway through the tenth season and took on the role of showrunner for the eleventh season. As a credited writer, Zabel contributed to over 45 scripts for ER. Zabel and R. Scott Gemmill were awarded the Humanitas Prize in the 60 minutes category in 2007 for their script for the season 12 episode "There Are No Angels Here", which followed doctors from the Chicago-set series performing aid work in a refugee camp in Darfur. Humanitas stated that the prize was awarded for the episode's "unflinching look at the brutality inherent in civil wars and its belief that heroism is complex, complicated and multi-layered."