Gary David Goldberg, a writer and producer who created warmhearted television shows, most notably “Family Ties,” a leading comedy of the 1980s that propelled Michael J. Fox to stardom, died on Saturday at his home in Montecito, Calif. He was 68.

The cause was brain cancer, said his daughter Shana Silveri.

Mr. Goldberg came to writing relatively late, after a peripatetic young adulthood in the 1960s and early ’70s that included dropping out of colleges, waiting tables in Greenwich Village, hitchhiking around the world with the woman who would become his wife and starting a day care center with her in Northern California.

The rebellious flower-child sensibility that informed these adventures was the spur for “Family Ties,” which captured the culture clash between parents of the hippie generation and their children growing up during the Reagan administration.

The show, broadcast on NBC from 1982 to 1989, was set in a suburban neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio, and focused on the Keatons: Steven and Elyse (Michael Gross and Meredith Baxter-Birney) and their children, Alex (Mr. Fox), a bright, earnest young Republican with a hunger for wealth; the fashion-obsessed Mallory (Justine Bateman); and Jennifer (Tina Yothers), the intellectually precocious little sister. (In later seasons, after Ms. Baxter-Birney’s pregnancy was incorporated into the show, the family added a fourth child, Andrew, played by Brian Bonsall.)