Marion Dayre

Dayre grew up in rural Superior, Nebraska.^[2] In an interview with Forbes, Dayre shared, "I grew up in a funeral home in a 2,000-person town. My Dad, Uncle, and Grandpa are all funeral directors. In a small family business that means they do every job: from mowing to painting to sprinklers to driving the monument truck in the cemetery to handling floral arrangements to staffing funerals to the realer, more emotional stuff – moving with thousands of families through transformative experiences like grief and death and celebration of life. As early as grade school I started writing stories about birth and death and religion and spirituality and anatomy and miracles. I didn’t have words for it, but writing was one of my purest connections with higher power. Doing it for a living was the farthest thing from my mind."^[3]

As a teenager, she enjoyed creative writing and attended screenwriting workshops at the home of Lew Hunter.^[1] She attended Concordia University Nebraska and originally studied biochemistry, aspiring to be a mortician and join the family business or a pediatrician. During an exchange with Concordia College, she studied sketch comedy in New York City.^[4] She graduated in 2005 with a BFA in English.^[5][2] Her first writing job was as a railroad journalist.^[2][5]

Her pen name is rooted in paternal family names.^[1]

In 2008, Dayre moved to Los Angeles to pursue screenwriting.^[5] She worked as an assistant to United States of Tara showrunner Jill Soloway and then as an assistant to actor Jeff Garlin, including on the sets Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Goldbergs. With Garlin, she associate produced his 2013 film Dealin' with Idiots.^[4] Dayre also performed in sketch shows at Straitjacket Society and the Upright Citizens Brigade.^[4]

Dayre received her MFA in screenwriting from UCLA in 2013.^[2] With her original pilot script, Bury Me, based on her childhood in a funeral home, she took part in the 2014 Sundance Institute Writers Lab.^[4]

Dayre's big break was the AMC series Better Call Saul, which she joined in its inaugural season as a writers' assistant and rose in rank to executive story editor and writer. For the first two seasons (2015–2016), she worked as a writer's assistant and then script coordinator. She wrote her first episode with Vince Gilligan, the second season finale "Klick".^[6] Dayre would go on to write the episodes "Slip" (S3, E8), "Talk" (S4, E4), and "Dedicado a Max" (S5, E5). Dayre also functioned as the fourth season's story editor (2018) and as executive story editor for the fifth season (2020).

In 2021, it was announced Dayre would be head writer of the Disney+ Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) miniseries, Echo.^[7] It is based on the Marvel Comics character of the same name and a spin-off from the 2021 series Hawkeye. The show was released in early 2024.

In February 2023, it was announced that Amazon would produce an animated television adaptation of the comic book Wytches, with co-showrunners Scott Snyder and Dayre.^[8][9][3]

As of February 2026, Dayre opened a writers room for an additional Untitled series for Amazon Prime Video.

Dayre also teaches television series development at The University of Georgia and San Francisco State University.^[10]