Mark-Paul Gosselaar

Actor Mark-Paul Gosselaar rose from teen idol status on the wildly popular "Saved By the Bell" (NBC, 1989-1993) to steady work as a leading man on a sizable number of television series, including "NYPD Blue" (ABC, 1993-2005) and "mixed-ish" (ABC, 2019- ). Born Mark-Paul Harry Gosselaar on March 1, 1974 in the San Fernando Valley suburb of Panorama City, California, he was the youngest of four children by Dutch-Jewish and Dutch-Indonesian parents. He began modeling at the age of five years, which led to appearances in television commercials and then guest roles on episodic series like "The Wonder Years" (ABC, 1988-1993). He made his series regular debut on The Disney Channel's "Good Morning Miss Bliss" (1988-1989), a school comedy with Hayley Mills as a Midwestern junior high teacher. When the series was axed after a single season, NBC, which produced the show for the Disney Channel, retained a portion of its juvenile players - including Gosselaar, Dustin Diamond and Lark Voorhees - and folded them into a new program, "Saved By the Bell." Anchored around Gosselaar's handsome wisenheimer Zack Morris, "Bell" was broad comedy but played extremely well with young viewers, which ran until 1993, when several of the primary cast members had left the program. Gosselaar, however, remained faithful to the brand, and reprised a slightly more mature Morris in two TV-movies and a short-lived primetime follow-up series, "Saved by the Bell: The College Years" (NBC, 1993-1994). The long-running connection to "Bell" proved to be a hurdle for Gosselaar, who struggled to find roles outside of teen-oriented projects; adding insult to injury was growing tension between his mother, who had served as his manager from an early age, over money. After extricating himself from their arrangement, Gosselaar worked tirelessly to establish himself as a mature actor through roles on the primetime series "Hyperion Bay" (The WB, 1998-1999) and "D.C" (NBC, 2000) and the MTV feature production "Dead Man on Campus" (1999). In 2001, his efforts paid off when he replaced Rick Schroeder as partner to Dennis Franz's Andy Sipowicz on "NYPD Blue." His by-the-book detective, John Clark, Jr., drew from his partner's experience in establishing his own career, which also helped him overcome some personal struggles, most notably with his strict father, who later committed suicide, and the death of a girlfriend that resulted in Clark's own struggles with alcohol. Gosselaar's stint with "Blue," which ran until the series' conclusion in 2005, helped to establish him as a dependable small screen leading man, which he parlayed into steady work on numerous dramatic and comedy series. Though many of these lasted a single season, including the Geena Davis political series "Commander in Chief" (ABC, 2005-06) and the legal drama "Raising the Bar" (TNT, 2008-09) - both produced by "Blue's" Steven Bochco - the legal comedy-drama "Franklin & Bash" (TNT, 2011-14), with Gosselaar and Breckin Meyer as unconventional lawyers, ran for four seasons on TNT, and he enjoyed a three-episode arc on "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" (CBS, 2000-2015), playing against type as a serial killer. From 2015 to 2019, Gosselaar was cast in four different series - the comedy "Truth Be Told" (NBC, 2015), the critically praised baseball drama "Pitch" (Fox, 2016-17), with Gosselaar as an aging major league pitcher, the TV Land comedy "Nobodies" (2017-18) and the apocalyptic horror/science fiction program "The Passage" (Fox, 2018) for producer Ridley Scott. Three out of the four ended after a single season on air, but Gosselaar's popularity kept him at the top of casting agents' lists for leading men, as evidenced by his starring role on "mixed-ish" (ABC, 2019), a spin-off of "black-ish" (ABC, 2014- ) with Arica Himmel as the adolescent version of Tracee Ellis Ross's Rainbow Johnson and Gosselaar as her father, who was played by Beau Bridges in the parent series.