Cops and detectives, doctors and lawyers, spies and cowboys, heroes, superheroes and semi-superheroes. These are staples of television drama, and one of the unsung people who stapled them was Jackson Gillis, a prolific slogger in the trenches of television writing whose career spanned more than four decades and whose scripts put words in the mouths of Superman, Perry Mason, Columbo, Wonder Woman, Zorro, Tarzan, Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin, Jessica Fletcher and, in a manner of speaking, Lassie.

Mr. Gillis died of pneumonia in Moscow, Idaho, on Aug. 19, his daughter, Candida, said. He was 93.

Mr. Gillis was not an award winner  he was nominated for a single Emmy, in 1972, for an episode of “Columbo”  but his résumé traces a remarkable path through the evolution of prime time. His niche was the plot-driven tale of distress, in which danger disturbs the serene status quo, is cranked up to crisis dimensions and is resolved with dispatch by the protagonist, all in a neat half-hour, or, more often, an hour.

The formula, of course, stayed remarkably consistent during his career  and it has remained so  but Mr. Gillis showed he could adapt to the tenor of the times.

In the 1950s, his dialogue, in “The Adventures of Superman” and “Lassie,” for example, was replete with homespun clichés (if sometimes winkingly so) and not especially subtle repartee. In the 1960s, when he wrote for shows like “I Spy” and “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,” with their wisecracking secret agents, he incorporated the hip lingo that television, however tentatively, invoked to reflect the decade. Later, in “Columbo,” he helped define the low-key nature of the title character (played by Peter Falk), with lines that were understated and wry.