Juanita Bartlett is a television writer best known for The Rockford Files and The New Maverick, both starring James Garner. Bartlett also worked on Garner's series Nichols, as well as The Greatest American Hero, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, and several others. Bartlett worked for Roy Huggins, Stephen J. Cannell, and Meta Rosenberg, and also became a producer as well as a writer. Huggins noted in a videotaped interview for the Archive of American Television that Bartlett was the only writer with whom he ever worked who changed the structure of some of Huggins' stories and actually improved them.
In 1986, Juanita Bartlett went on to create Bartlett's own production company originally known as Jadda Productions. Jadda Productions' first production was the second season of Spencer: For Hire, and would later go on to produce the show In the Heat of the Night when it premiered on March 6, 1988. When the second season of In the Heat of the Night premiered, the production company was renamed Juanita Bartlett Productions. After the last In the Heat of the Night movie aired after Hugh O'Connor died, Juanita Bartlett Productions no longer existed.