Martin Tahse, a producer whose television shows examining the troubles and traumas of adolescence were frequent features on the long-running series ABC Afterschool Specials, died on July 1 in Los Angeles. He was 84.

A friend, Oliver Fuselier, confirmed the death, which he said was not immediately made public.

Early in his career, Mr. Tahse (pronounce TAH-see) was a producer for touring versions of Broadway shows, including the musicals “Fiorello!” and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” Much later he had an abbreviated run as a Broadway playwright himself: He adapted the Allan Gurganus novel “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All” into a one-woman show that starred Ellen Burstyn. It closed after opening night in 2003.

He earned much greater success on television, where between 1974 and 1989 he was a producer or executive producer of more than 20 dramatic shows intended for schoolchildren home at the end of the day. The shows, most of them 45 minutes or an hour long, were generally driven by the predicament of a child with a problem (in “The Skating Rink” (1975), for example, the protagonist is a teenage boy with a stutter) and were frequently, in the end, uplifting.

Still, Mr. Tahse’s shows often ventured into serious issues like teenage pregnancy, parental alcoholism, race relations and suicide. Two of the shows won daytime Emmy Awards: “Very Good Friends” (1977), which starred Melissa Sue Anderson (later of “Little House on the Prairie”) as a 13-year-old girl coping with her younger sister’s accidental death, and “A Matter of Time” (1981), about a girl facing her mother’s imminent death from cancer.