Thomas Steven Cook was born in Cleveland to Horace William, a business executive, and Betty Marion Cook (née Thompson), a homemaker. He began working as a technical editor in 1974 at the engineering and manufacturing company ITT Gilfillan in Panorama City, California. In 1984, Cook was hired as a lecturer at the University of Nevada in 1984.[2]
As a writer, Cook has written several television movies. He got his first writing credit with the 1979thriller filmThe China Syndrome, which earned him Oscar and Golden Globe-nominations for Best Screenplay. He continued his career by writing episodes of shows, such as Project UFO (1978), and Airwolf (1984). For Nightbreaker (1989), Cook received Writers Guild of America Award. He received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Writing for a Miniseries or a Special, sharing with Paris Qualles, Trey Ellis, Ron Hutchinson, and Robert Williams for The Tuskegee Airmen (1995). By the 2000s, he wrote The Hive (2008), and NYC: Tornado Terror (2008), both of them which aired on Syfy.
