David Angell was born in Providence, Rhode Island, to Henry and Mae (née Cooney) Angell. He received a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Providence College. He entered the U.S. Army upon graduation and served at the Pentagon until 1972. He then moved to Boston and worked as a methods analyst at an engineering company and later at an insurance firm in Rhode Island. His brother, the Most Rev. Kenneth Angell, is a Roman Catholic prelate and former Bishop of Burlington, Vermont. David Angell moved to Los Angeles in 1977. His first script was sold to the producers of the Annie Flynn series. Five years later, he sold his second script to Archie Bunker’s Place. In 1983, he joined Cheers as a staff writer. In 1985, Angell joined forces with Peter Casey and David Lee as Cheers supervising producers/writers. The trio received 37 Emmy Award nominations and won 24 Emmy Awards, including the above-mentioned for Frasier, as well as an Outstanding Comedy Series Emmy for Cheers, in 1989, which Angell, Casey, Lee and the series’ other producers shared, and Outstanding Writing/Comedy Emmy for Cheers, which Angell received in 1984. After working together as producers on Cheers, Angell, Casey and Lee formed Grub Street Productions. In 1990, they created and executive-produced the comedy series Wings.

David Angell and his wife, Lynn, were among the passengers of American Airlines Flight 11 killed in the September 11 attacks when the plane was hijacked by members of Al Qaeda and flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City in 2001. Coincidentally, a 1997 episode of Frasier titled “Odd Man Out” (an episode which Angell co-wrote) features a woman’s voice on Dr. Frasier Crane’s answering machine stating she will arrive into Sea-Tac Airport on American Airlines’ Flight 11. The episode was first broadcast on May 27, 1997: 4 years and 3 months before Angell and his wife perished aboard that same flight.