At 70, writer-producer David Milch should be enjoying the rewards of a long, successful career in television. Widely respected in the industry, he has written for Steven Bochco’s acclaimed Hill Street Blues and co-created Bochco’s NYPD Blue. He was the executive producer of HBO’s Deadwood. He’s taught literature at Yale and has a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame. By some accounts, his career has netted him $100 million. But Milch and his wife currently reside in a “modest” Santa Monica rental and are staring down $17 million in debt, desperately behind in paying their taxes and mortgages. Stephen Galloway and Scott Johnson explain how this came to be in an investigative piece for The Hollywood Reporter. The culprit, the article reveals, is Milch’s addiction to betting on horse races. The same creativity and obsession that have fueled his writing career are also at the heart of his gambling addiction, it seems. So integral is gambling to Milch’s life that he built an entire show, HBO’s doomed Luck, around horse racing. At one time, the writer even owned some prize-winning horses, though he sold the last of these in 2003.