Cagney & Lacey Wrap-Up: Ain’t That the Way

Welcome to Eighties TV Ladies, part of the weirding Way Media Network. Pretty hello, and welcome to eighties TV Ladies. I'm Susan Lambert HadAM and I'm Sharon Johnson. We're here to talk to you about female driven television shows from the nineteen eighties. We are wrapping up our series of episodes on Cagney and Lacy, and we got to talk with the most incredible stars and creators of this show.

We dived into all these amazing interviews which gave us incredible gifts and insight into the show. We still had a lot to say about this show and some questions that we decided to end our season with a little bow on it. Yes, this is our last season, our last season. No, it's not. No, it's not.

Hopefully now told you told you. This is our last episode, Yes, Sharon, episode Yes, of season one. I can't believe it's twenty three episodes. I can't either. It seems like yesterday that we started this.

Let alone, We've got twenty three episodes, twenty third episodes. Amazing, and I was like, Sharon, we'll do sixteen and then we'll see how we feel. I'd planned for sixteen and then we were going to sort of regroup, and we just blew right past that. But we were so lucky to get these amazing guests. Of course we had to share them and make room for them in our plans, and you know, plans are there to be changed, I'm telling you in season two.

We've got all sorts of plans for season two, and who knows what's going to happen. We're not share either, so we'll see, but so far it's all worked out for us. So yeah, we're lining up some amazing guests for season two and and I just I can't believe it. It's been such a gift. I want to thank Kevin.

I want to thank Melissa, who's joining us today by zoom with her mom My beautiful Momhi ladies, Hi ladies. And I want to thank Sharon. I think, thank you for saying yes to me when I asked you to do this crazy thing. Well, thank you for asking. This has been so much fun.

I gotta tell you, it's been. I was excited about it, but I didn't know what I was getting into exactly, so you never know, but I was like, who can I just chat with that knows more about television than I do, and it was you, Sharon, So thank you for joining and being game when it was just you and me and me trying to run sound Yeah, that was fun. That was ever going to hear that episode. It's all been such a great learning experience, and we still have so much more to learn, not just about podcasting but especially about ades TV, and here we I thought I knew so much and I have learned so much over this first season. I thought there were a lot of shows to look at, but there were even more.

Once you start, you discovered there's more and then more to say and more people to talk to. And I'm just so thrilled about the interviews we've gotten in the interviews we're lining up anyway. So this is our wrap up for the Cagney and Lacy series of episodes. If you're just joining us today, you can start right here at this episode, because this is going to be kind of an overview of the series, or you can head back to episode seventeen and start with our interview with Barney Rosenschwi Part one, the creator of Cagney and Lacy, and go from there. Cagney and Lacy was a police procedural drama that ran on CBS from nineteen eighty two to nineteen eighty eight.

It starts Sharon Glass and Tying Dahlias, two women detectives and partners in the New York Police Department. It was based on a TV movie that aired in nineteen eighty one, which ended up being basically a backdoor pilot to the show. That TV movie starred Lauretta Swit as Christine Cagney and Time Daily as Mary Beth Lacey. And then there are the six lost episodes with Meg Foster, who was Cagney number two, but the first Cagney in the series as opposed to the TV movie that Loretta Switt started. Yeah, so they sort of made half like a quarter of a season of typical shows at that point, picked it up with Meg Foster replacing Loretta Switt, and she was very good.

And so we'll talk about Barney calls them the six lost episodes, because of course then the show was going to be canceled, and then Barney was fighting hard for it and it came back for season two, but they made him recast, and so they said Meg Foster has to go. You need a new Cagney, and they went back to the first Cagney. They wont tire that. Barbara Corday, the writer also creator of the show, who was Mary to Barney at the time, had seen and said Sharon Glass should be Cagney early early on, and Barney was like who. But then he watched something with her, a TV movie I believe, and was like, yes, I'd like her, but he couldn't get her.

He couldn't get her for the TV movie, so they cast lettis Wit from Mash and then he couldn't get her when it got picked up to series. He tried to get her, but she was going on house calls to replace somebody amazing red Grave Lynn Redgrave. Lynn Redgrave as Sharon Glass, talks about house calls in the book that she wrote called Apparently there were complaints. She talks about how much she did not want to replace Lynn Redgrave, an American icon of an actress. It was about a hospital administrator.

Lynn Redgrave played a hospital administrator, but it heads with the male lead, who I believe was Wayne Rogers. Yes from Mash. Yes, yes, also from Mash who got out of his contract. I guess early enough. Oh, he left the show very early.

I want to say fifth or sixth seasons something like that. It's hard to know because that show ran for eleven seasons. Yes, they were replacing Lynn Redgrave. Following the birth of her child. She wanted to be able to breastfeed her daughter and they were like nope, and they were like, you're holding out for more money or something.

But and around the same time, I believe that Shirley was leaving Laverne and Shirley for some of the same reasons. So there you go. Women in the workplace, Clearly there weren't enough women around to be able to say, excuse me, yeah, this is this is this is a real thing, and yeah, there's no we should we should work around this because this is this is something very important. But you know, because to men, obviously it's not a big deal. Yes, So but I will say that Sharon Glass tells some insider scoop in her book about some of this, not all of it, because again, she was under contract Universal they could basically say go do this, and it was very hard for her to say no.

But she did not enjoy the experience with her co star. It didn't sound like in the book very much. So moving on, But it turns out Housecalls did not do well with the Lynn Redgrave leaving the show and all of that controversy around that, and so it was canceled just in time for Sharon Glass to join Cagney Lacey, and she still said no, apparently when they went back around, except that her now manager who used to be her boss at Universal, the head of casting, Monique James, said let's go to lunch with Barney. And this is where I recommend that you listen to part two of our episode with Barney, because he talks about this whole process and what actually happened that allowed him to get Sharon Glass into this show this time.

It's a great story. It is a great story. And what's kind of amazing is, you know, given that there were now three cagneyes, I had sort of forgotten that. It was one of the surprises in starting to look back at that show to realize, wait, it wasn't always Sharon gless because she obviously went on to be Christine Cagney for the rest of the run for seven seasons, one hundred and twenty four episodes, four TV movies after that, So this is you know, the show really became that show, even though it had these iconic moments before with these other two very amazing actresses, so that has really fascinated me. The three Cagneyes was a huge discovery for me.

I guess people that watched all of Cagney Lacy at the time probably noticed, But I was pretty young. I watched the show. I remember the show. I liked the characters. I didn't really care that much about like the adult world.

It felt very adult. I was definitely more in the comedy action. I was basically a kid, so I mean a similar situation that I was aware of it. You couldn't not be aware of it. I don't remember why it wasn't part of my steady TV diet, but I certainly knew about it.

How could you not if you paid any attention to television. I do remember it winning Emmy's year after year after year after year. Yes, you know so. And I've always loved certainly both of the lead actresses. They're just so great on the show and just so great in general, and not just because we had them on our podcast.

Yeah, and in revisiting this show, I appreciate it so much more. I appreciated the two women comps and I think That was definitely a draw for me as even as a kid, like these are women doing a really interesting job in a time when there weren't a lot of female comps. Certainly not too that would be a detectives and be partnered together. I think it was really amazing that they were detectives. I'm not sure there were any actual NYPD female detectives at the time, and I went and researched this for a little bit back when we really first started, and I remember going, Okay, were there any women cops?

And there were There were women cops in the NYPD. There were early cops from the forties, female cops from the forties in New York, but they were pretty rare, and then again in the sixties and seventies there started to be more. In the late seventies, the NYPD apparently realized they needed more diversity in their ranks and felt that that would be helpful as it would be, and so they started actually recruiting women and minorities, to actively recruiting women and minorities for the police force, and then the numbers started to climb, but they were still pretty low. But many women told the actresses after the fact that Cagney and Lacy made them want to be a cop. Tyne said if she was like, don't do it, or in an interview I read she wanted to say, don't do that, don't join the cop force.

But anyway, not based on a TV show. But you know, people have done more for less. Yeah, but it is one of the things that television can do open your mind or open your world up to possibilities. So whether it encourage women to become cops or step into other roles that they hadn't necessarily thought were for them, I think, you know, the Cagneys and Lacy's and other shows can play a role and helping women see and certainly then helping women see, hey, maybe there's room for me in that world. Yes, And then I do remember in the research, just to go back, is that it took a long time for them to actually start promoting women.

What they realized was that women quickly realized they weren't being promoted and then they would leave here. Yeah, hasn't that a surprise? The fact that they were detectives, which meant they had been promoted from the beat cop right, they had earned their right to be in that squad and Christine's a sergeant, yes, and actually goes to become a sergeant during the course the run of the show and make fit and makes it, yes, and then she wants to be lieutenant, the Christine Cagney character. And that's the interesting thing. It was also ambition watching women be ambitious and want something in the workplace, particularly a workplace that isn't particularly welcoming to that clearly, and that she wanted to be one of the boys.

She wanted to become lieutenant. She wanted to move up. She was a very ambitious person and cop and was not shy about it. I mean, I think she said on more than one occasion her ultimate goal is to be a police commissioner. That's what she was striving for, hoping working towards in her work life.

And you watch them both move up and get accolades over the run of the show, and I thought that was really interesting and that one would get something and the other wouldn't. The idea that two women would work together in a high pressure job as partners was just something you did not see on television, and you still don't see a lot of it on television because even when there's a female cop it's like, well, we'll partner them with love guy because that's gonna be zee, you know. But you see a lot of dude guys being cops. I mean, it's it's just it's very interesting. And they've they've sort of talked about rebooting this show several times.

I'm still not sure why it isn't or hasn't. Could you could could reboot it? Yeah? Absolutely. I think of the original Law and Order because that's really the only one that I watch, and I don't think they have ever had a series regular female cop.

There was a point during the latter part of the first iteration when there were a couple of women. I think that came and went, but not as a series. It's always been men they made. I mean, yes, they brought in Lieutenant van Buren, but not I'm talking about the two cops are out running around trying to solve and it would have been nice if when they did the reboot, they had either made one of the two cops female. Sure, go ahead and make the lieutenant a man again, or made the lead prosecutor a woman and not a man again.

I don't think we've ever had the lead prosecutor on that show. Did she not get to move up? I wasn't. No, there has the DA was a woman. It was Diane West was yes, Diane West exactly, she was the DA.

But they've never had the lead prosecutor be a woman, and this was a perfect time to do one of those two things, and they didn't for whatever reason. I think, I think we know. When they did bring it back, they did bring back as many of the actors who were playing those roles, or at least one of the two cops they brought back. Anthony Anderson had been on Law and Order before he did Blackish, so they brought him back. And I don't know if that was to try to get people interested or you know, hey, Anthony Anderson's back.

He we're bringing him back, and we're bringing Sam Waterston back. I love Sam Waterston. But nevertheless, and now all the other people were new, so maybe that was their way of saying, Okay, we've got some continuity here. But then after the first season Anthony Anderson left. They could have brought in a female cop to replace him, but they didn't.

So I just think that there were some opportunities missed there. Yeah, and not just in that so, you know, there's a Rissoli Risolian Isles, Rissoli and Aisles. That's correct, Risoli and Rissoli, and which I have just recently started watching and I like it. It hit the time when I wasn't watching that much television, so I didn't start it then. So diving into shows now clearly now I'm only doing it for the podcast, spending my time in the eighties right now.

Deep in the eighties, there was a British show that somebody was recommending. I think some one of our listeners recommended Scott and Bailey, which was a British show with two women drama series. They investigate murders in Manchester's police department. And then I was just just in terms of like women working together in the workplace, like parks and rec was really pretty interesting to me in that, you know, it was really the Leslie Nope show in a lot of ways, but the ensemble had a lot of female love in that show, but also the friendships within that workplace very much centered around the women. I also think of Glow as another workplace women in the workplace show.

I loved Glow. I liked Galow a lot. Yeah, and Hacks is women in the workplace. The dynamic is pretty different for that. But and then Abbott Elementary and over the years, we've had a lot of the female friendship shows, not as many as I think we should have, but you know, Laverne and Shirley and I love Lucy and Golden Girls and Designing Women.

Now, Designing Women was great because it was both right exactly. Designing Women was great because it was both women in the workplace and they were friends. It was sort of one of the reasons they worked together. They were related and they were friends, although it's not they never were clear on when it came to Charlene and Annie Pott's character. Again, this is my day for not remembering names of people and characters, whether they knew each other, how they knew each other before they started this business.

It seemed like the show started the beginning of the show was sort of at the beginning of Sugar Bakers. But they never and not that they had to, but I don't know that they ever explained how they all, how they all came together. It felt to me like Mary Joe just to jump to design that Mary Joe, any Pon's character in Designing Women had been hired that she was an interior designer that they had hired. We haven't dived into that show. We you know, we might soon sometime, maybe Avian next season.

But yeah, but it's so clear that they are friends at the time that we meet them. Yes, but we never get the backstory of how they all We never got that episode of how we all met kind of thing. Anyway. But back to Cagney and Lacy, the style of the show felt more seventies than eighties to me, of Cagney and Lacy, of Cagney and Lacy, certainly the early seasons. I mean, obviously, the TV movie was aired in nineteen eighty one, meant that it was sold in nineteen seventy nine and made in nineteen eighty right, So that had a real seventies feel to it.

The TV movie with Rose Switt and I appreciated that the show was not quite that edgy and gritty. It was, you know, sort of a little bit filtered down for television series, but it's it has that Lou Grant feel, that Hill Street Blues feel. It's not quite as slick slick as Hill Street Blues. I actually found it more kind of rough around the edges. You know, and it felt kind of it wasn't a lot of run and gun.

They had their moments of running, you know, around and you know, holding their pistols out free sucker. They never really said that, not the sucker part anyway, But it felt more like actual police work, detective work. They were on the phone far more often than they were chasing a suspect. Oh yeah, by far. They did a lot of leg work, which you could call it leg work, but really it was talking on the phone work.

Yeah, an interviews and calling people and tracking down people and you know, well, here's the information we got, and just exchanging information and making a new plan. And I thought that was a more realistic portrayal of what, you know, investigative work is. And the other thing that I kind of liked about this show, and I was reminded watching it, is how much television was the only thing we had, like the Internet. It was a way to inform people of what was happening in the world. It was a way for you to learn about things.

And I'm thinking of the microwave oven episode. It's not an episode, it's a scene that got pulled out from season four, episode eleven, nineteen eighty four. It's a fetty scene. It's another sort of exposition scene. And yet the other story that's going on in that scene is that Marybeth Lacy is teaching the lieutenant how to use a microwave.

And I was like, wait, now, come on, people had microwaves, then did we have? I am trying to remember when we got a microwave, but that's the eighties, was when microwaves were going into people's homes. At the time that episode aired, only thirty five percent of households in the United States had a microwave, and so a lot of people didn't know how they worked. And so I am sure that part of that was look at this cool thing, this cool new thing, and here's how it works, and that there was probably a lot maybe paid by ge Or ken Moore maybe going maybe those guys sidling up, going hey, wouldn't it be cool if you've put a microwave in this scene? And I thought it was so cute the way the lieutenant was just so gleeful about it, and it kept using it later throughout the subsequent episodes in season and his little microwave behind his desk, and he was just so giddy about it.

And I forgot to write down. But there's an earlier episode where Mary Beth is somewhere and she sees a microwave and she's like, she sort of almost pets it, like she's like, oh, what's that, Like, it's it's not the it's not in the station house, it's somewhere else. And you're like, oh, yeah, that's like if we you know, the first time you saw a Tesla, you know, like you'd be like, oh, well, look at that new car. I must confess I resisted getting a microwave for the longest time. I feel like I was probably one of the very last five percent of people in the United States and finally broke down and bought microwave.

I don't know what was holding me back, Probably the same thing that held me back from getting an answering machine for a long time. I just refused to get one. I didn't see the need. Junior year, I lived off campus in an apartment and we had a microwave and there was no stove in there. Right, We didn't have a stove because it was an unfurnished apartment and we didn't buy one because we were college students, So we had literally a little burner and inexplicably, in Los Angeles, landlords were not required to provide utility things like like stoves and refrigerators, which I moving here from somewhere else I found just mind boggling.

I still to this day don't understand it was it was a joke that we lived without a stove. I was there for a year and a half in that apartment and it was just funny. My little burner and a microwave. I mean, that's what you kind of can live on in college. Absolutely, you really couldn't boil water on that burner.

You were lucky if you could. I don't know, fry an egg. All right, So we're gonna take a little break and come back. We'll be right back, all right, Sharon, Welcome back. The police or the somebody went to Cagney and Lacy and said to the network and said, could you please have Cagney wear her seatbelt because apparently they would jump in the car and start going and time daily.

I think, as just an actress had just decided that Marybeth would buckle up, but Christine Cagney didn't, And so apparently traffic officers were pulling people over and saying you're not wearing your seat belt and you should be saying wearing your seatbelt, and they say, well, Cagney, Lacey don't wear one. So they finally wrote it into the script a little bit where you know, Cagney was like, I don't wear my seat belt and Marybeth finally was like, Christine, buckle up, or I'm not starting the car. And the fact that they did that, I just think that's fascinating. It's like, well, certainly, the fact is how people were going to live their lives, how these characters behaved on television, And at some point networks stopped letting people smoke on TV for a similar reason.

Yes, that's what I was going to say. The first season time Daily, mary Beth lay he is smoking in almost every episode. She's like, hello, Harvey, I'm home, and You're like, what was that allowed? And I had forgotten that people smoke on television until again, the you know, Lung Association basically said could you please stop having characters smoke on television? And finally it's you.

It's very you don't see it, and for good reason, it's really disconcerting when you do see it, whether it be an old episode like Cagney and Lacy or something like that, or the Tonight Show. There's Johnny puffing away throughout the right forgone camera and before he started smoking between commercial breaks, and sometimes you'd see him putting a cigarette cigarette as they come back from commercial. Oh my god, that's so funny. Well, and it's just so funny in the episode because Harvey's like, from our anniversary, I wanted you to stop smoking because I just heard these I just didn't you read about the new news reports. And again, here's where I think television failed to responsibility to impart information, which is so interesting because I don't think that's a lot of discussion now because we have the Internet, we have so many other ways to impart information, and I don't know that there's the kind of impact well, low hanging fruit, if you will, like stop smoking cigarettes or and certainly alcohol has been taken off of television at least advertising, let alone seat belts things like that.

For the most part, you will not see that on network television or even on any television. Even in movies really unless it's like a period piece. But if you watch something that's that's contemporary, you're not going to see people necessarily smoking or drinking. Well maybe maybe drinking, but it's not real alcohol. But they're going to put their seat belts on there, you know, unless they're a bad guy or something.

Yeah, unless they're making a point. Every other normal person puts on a seatbelt. And also, I know Designing Women did this too when they gave Mary Beth Lacy breast cancer, which I think Time Daily was a little bit upset about because the show took a turn into that soap opera element, which inevitably made the women on the show, instead of being heroic, they also became heroic victims. And so they went through breast cancer and alcoholism and rape, and you know, I think it's important like in the show, I think it fits the show that they that that stuff happened. It didn't feel like, of course not, because it was also what women were going through, what everybody was going through in terms of how are you going to address this unless you make it personal for these characters.

But at the same time, I totally see her point that Time Daily had when we talked to her of I signed up to be a hero, I signed up to be the buddy cop show. I signed up to run and solve crimes and yes, and have a personal life and be a real person. But I didn't necessarily sign up to do, you know, six episodes on my breast cancer and be crying, you know, and worried all the time. But at the same time, when you watch those episodes now you recognize that they are imparting information about breast cancer to women, that they are making sure women know, oh you could have you know, they literally give her what you can do this, you should get a second opinion, you can do this. I mean, there's lots of things, and it was sort of an ongoing issue in a couple of episodes of Cagneting Lacy, but I like that there's basically she misses the sergeant's exam in order to treat her breast cancer.

So Mary Beth doesn't get to take the sergeant's exam at the time that was optimal to take it because of that, And again I know that you know, that was a cool, dramatic thing to do, but it was also a realistic thing that people who are facing health crisis is have to work around that in their workspace, and it doesn't always work out for them, and particularly women who are juggling a lot, particularly if they have families. Yeah, I liked that the show felt that responsibility, and you see it when you're watching it again and recognizing how important television was to imparting information to us as a culture. And also in some of the you know, there's a couple of episodes that very lightly touch on LGBTQ issues and all the issues that Cagney and Lacy touches on, and they were and they're very thoughtfully.

Again, I thought the show was very thoughtful and mindful for nineteen mid eighties. Well, I think they're thoughtful and mindful for today because the way that they handle a lot of these, for lack of a better, worthy issues, these storylines that you could consider to be hot button or issue or whatever her was. I was blown away by how well they handled it. The episode where as Lacy is expecting her third child, they have to go and try to do some crowd control an abortion clinic, and we find out later through a conversation she's having with her husband that she had had an abortion when she was late teen's early twenties, and it's clear that he knows the whole story, which is in and of itself great, pretty amazing.

Yeah, Harvey, Yeah, pretty awesome. Oh, Harvey's Harve pretty awesome husband. Yeah, Harvey's time it is, But in any of it, at the end of that conversation, I was just like, Wow, I don't know that I've ever seen that kind of discussion between a husband and wife handled so well. I was blown away by how well written this show is, especially the way they handle a lot of thanks like this and some of the language that they used. I remember when in the episode called Violation, where a sixteen year old boy ends up in Rikers over the weekend because he gave a fake name and ends up getting sexually assaulted.

I mean, and not just that, but the parents are suing the department and Cagney and Lacey go to talk to them because they want to talk to the kid to try to find out who did this to him so they can be prosecuted, and the father will not let them in the house. He just SE's like no, and as there they finally give up. In their leaving, he uses I'm not even sure I can stay this on our podcast, But he uses the word and I thought, I don't know that I've ever heard that word used on television then, or certainly not, since it was stunning, but it was also true to its time that that would be a word that would be bandied about without anybody really think twice about it, So that is so interesting. There has been some talk when Barney would talk about putting in words that he knew would not get through.

The network would end up fighting over that, and he'd be like, oh, okay, I'll give up on that, and then he'd get in either words or situations that he wanted to get in. Yeah, you like to stack the deck a little bit so that he had something, he had something to give away. Yes, oh okay, if you make me, I'll give this up. But I'm slipping these three others right through you, you know. But come on, you gotta let me keep this, you know.

And this was made for adults. This was a show made for adults, and I think working adults like people who were juggling busy lives, right and that could appreciate the complexity of the stories that they're telling. The subtlety of some of the storytelling is really still striking because it's not flashy. You know, it's covering controversial topics, but in a really subtle way. What I love about is that it is addressing the complexity of the human condition in those stories that there's not necessarily a right answer or wrong answer, but the answer you get to is that people have to do what they have to do to get by, and it's none of your business, basically, like like that was sort of the thing, that it's not on you to judge what other people have to do, whether that's abortion, whether that's surviving alcoholism or sexual assault or rape or breast cancer or whatever.

That there's not an easy answer. But even in the smaller Fewell stories forgive me, I can't remember what episode it is, but we find out that the lieutenant is a strange from his son. Sun shows up at the station and it's trying to talk to his father and it's clear they're just you know, they can't seem to just to talk to each other, and the son sort of throws out, yeah, I'm now married, and no, you didn't get invited to the wedding. So the Lieutenant's like, okay, So he goes out to lunch with his ex wife and they have this conversation that sounded like a conversation that people would have. They weren't overt about it.

He's just sort of indirectly trying to get information and trying to talk to her about it. But they're not really dealing with the real issue, if you will. They're just kind of talking around everything. And I thought, well, that's how people talk. You know, they're not going to go Well he didn't tell me, and I'm upset.

Well, you're upset because of this, and you know, you know, it was clear that that's not what the conversation was about, but it gave him something to think about, and he went away and thought about it and shows up at his son's house, at his son's apartment and tries to be more understanding. Isn't quite the quite word, but trying to be to not make his son feel like he's being lecture to ur trying to be forced into do something he doesn't want to do. And they end with kind of a reproschema where things seem like they might be able to move forward, but you're not sure he could still go off the rails. That's how people because people are complicated. All right, Well, we're clearly in the episode phase of this, because you know, you reminded me of one of my favorite episodes.

Weirdly, and again, I wouldn't necessarily think I would have picked it out, never would have picked it out in my childhood or teens or college years, but I pick it out now. It's called Burnout, and it's season two, episode seventeen. Lacy is kind of overwhelmed with all the cop wife mother. She's literally counting down the hours and minutes to her vacation, and then her vacation gets pushed because they have to go undercover at the hospital as nuns, and who else can be nuns and so it's just just a day and she's like, clearly, she's just done, So she just walks out of the station and disappears. But it's really about her hitting that limit of trying to have it all that was a lot of the eighties and particularly directed at women, like, Okay, you want to be in the workplace, great, just be perfect at being a mom and a workplace person and a you know, and a wife and you know, and take care of doing it all.

And she's so done, and she ends up just sort of going to the beach right in the train. She never gets off the train. She ends up at some you know, New York beach. I don't know wherever that is. I kind of sits on the beach and this and this very unusual woman comes up to her, and at first I'm like, did they send her?

That gets a little weird and somebody's just the meat of it once you get into it. It's Jennifer Warren, who you would recognize as sort of a guest star actress. She's done a lot of television and TV movies. But what was interesting is that nobody knows where she is. Harvey finally hears from her and she's like, I just need a minute.

I'm saying, I'm sorry, I'll get back to you, and then Jay's up, and then Harvey shows up to the precinct and really starts haranguing Lieutenant Samuels for basically, you know, overworking her. But Lieutenant Samuel's basically harangus Harvey for overworking her at home. But then also Harvey's like, no, I'm taking care of this, this and this, and like tennant Samuels like you sound like my ex wife. And I was like, that is such an insult right to men? Right?

What an insult? At that time, so Harvey has to go back at him with will you ruin your whole family? That's why your wife left, you know, And so they just tear at each other in some ways, in a very verbal way, in a very kind of mean way, because they're both upset that Lacy's missing, and then they have to back off of it. They actually do again have to realize like, Okay, we are both upset about this other thing. It just was so interesting the dialogue and that scene and what it was saying about gender roles and responsibility and what the pressures of the job were.

And I just thought that was really amazing. I don't know that I've seen anything like that on any other television show anywhere where between two men. Yeah, where the husband of our leading lady is having this argument with her boss about her burnout, and yeah, how come you're not helping her? I mean, that's just it's it's incredible. It's an incredible feel.

It's you know, because it's you know the Bechtel test, right, like two women having a conversation together. That's not about men. This is two men having a conversation that it is about a woman. Yes, and that's rare. That's not just about is she hut?

Like but is who it up? So I can't say that we'll believe it. I just thought it was a really interesting episode because it was recognizable, particularly when Dashall was little and I had step kids and it was three kids, and I was working at this, you know, like, no, I wasn't working. I was consulting, but I was. It was a lot.

It was a lot, and felt like I was doing none of it well, and so I was like, h yeah, yeah, okay. But it was also that feeling of I'm losing what's me as a person because I'm sort of making sure that everything is taken care of outside. And she has this line in there that I already promised too much of myself to too many people, and I thought that was really telling for a lot of women. What was interesting is that's the A story. The B story is the case.

Usually the A story is the case and the B story is the personal story. But in this one, it's clearly the A story, and that I thought was really interesting. And the B story is so Cagney and is Becky have to go undercover, so Cagney is a nun and is Becky is a hospital orderly, which you're like, well, they could have come up with that before let her vacation and there would be like we could move on to a different episode and she'd get a break. But because somebody's stealing drugs from the hospital, and it was sort of nice to have as Becky and Cagney have a couple of scenes together. But I gotta tell you, Sharon Glass looks great as a nun.

Like she looks at mate, You're like, who she makes a great nun. And then two sort of fun things happened in that episode that are sort of again nice balances to the harder drama of the a story. But it's that is Becky gets upset because one of the doctors like hits on Cagney as a nun and he and when the doctor was like, hey, we could get some dinner together or something, and then walks away and is Becky's like, he can't do that. He thinks you're a nun. And I'm like, oh, okay, So there is a line for his Becky, so okay.

But then of course, also that doctor turns out to be the one stealing the drugs because clearly he's so but was great is then Cagney gets to chase him down as a nun and the reach down and pull out her gun from her ankle holster under her nun's habit. So I thought that was just really there was some fun elements to that, and in general, they do a good job of that kind of balance in each episode with this going on over here versus something may be lighter or something. It's a delicate balance which they seem to handle very very well because it never feels like thinks are just kind of out of whack in terms of what's going on in various plays within the pre sayings. There's there's some The only thing is that there's a couple episodes that are a little bit slow, I mean, and it's interesting because you're like, okay, you can you cannot waste that kind of time on network television.

Now, you just got to move it along, I mean, come on. But there's a b story. It is an episode that is actually about undercover police offers accused of being gay because it's found out during the middle of an investigation that he had previously posed for nude pictures that end up in a game magazine at the time this is going down. And I'll remember the name of that episode. In a minute.

But the B story to that, which isn't you know, and that unfolds in a really interesting way, which again is one of the episodes that that we're going to look at in season two when we look at sort of LGBTQ and queer representation in eighties television and seventies and nineties television, because again it's it's very subtle, it's very cagneying lacy, and that it's not on the note, but it covers a lot of really interesting discussions around things that people weren't discussing in a very subtle and yet enlightened for the time way. And one of the things that struck me in there though the B story is basically all of the cops in the precinct have submitted to this lottery, and whether it's like the New York lottery or a state lottery, I don't quite know what the lottery is.

But the beginning of the B story is all of them getting the lottery tickets and then you watch each of them scratch off their ticket and it takes forever, like and they each have a different way of doing it, and Petrie is like, I do mind last, and he does, and he wins for them, right, so they've all pooled, they're all in the pool, and then it's the question of I guess then you can go, okay, we can give up the hundred dollar win or the thousand dollars chants, and then they win the thousand dollars chant or whatever it is. But then they can give that up for the big prize. And so they have to decide collectively what they're doing, and so it gets more interesting. But there's several shots, long, lingering shots of these cops scratching off lottery tickets, and I was like, I didn't know what to do with that as a as a viewer.

That's that's used to television moving at a different, much faster Yeah. I wonder if it, like you were saying, the product place with the microwave. I wonder if it was kind of like, well, that's when the scratchers first came out, because scratchers were not always around. You just played numbers. Oh my god, they had they like took the time to explain it.

You might be right on the Pluto. I've been watching The Outer Limits from nineteen sixty three. Wow. Oh, it's a it's a riot. You have to watch it.

It's it's like laugh out loud stuff. These actors, they're excellent actors. Without these actors they would be it would be a heart You could be unwatchable because they are acting their hearts out, you know, like totally ed Wood, like Eddie Albert wrestling of a branch. You know, like it's type and calib It's wonderful. But besides that, there is so much exposition that you're like, wow, that like just walking him down the hall, you know, like today you would just cut to the next room.

Yes, yes, they'd like show an airplane flying because you had to they were flying. Yeah, that they were actually flying somewhere else where. Now it'd be just like gout to Europe and you're there and there. So I think it really has to do with the learning curve of visual story story. Yeah, And I think that is such an interesting thing because I just I was like somewhat perplexed in the middle of that story that it felt like pretty early on things slowed down so we had these I was like, you would never get away with that.

Now it'd be like, yes, we see them, we get it. Well, it would be that, yeah, especially because they need that extra time for more commercials, at least on network television, but even on streaming where there are no commercials. Yeah, they would never. They would never do that because the audience is not used to that and wouldn't know what to do, or it just wouldn't work well. I'm also going to shout out one of my favorite episodes being season one, episode one with Meg Foster.

I thought that they again it's it feels a little on the nose because they start off as basically sex workers are being killed, and so you're going to be on the job as the female prostitutes, and so it feels a little bit like pandering to a particular audience. But I would imagine though that it was there was some truth to that that, Oh, we've got these women here, what are we gonna do with them? Oh yeah, we'll just have them go over here and stand on the street corner and for ten to be hookers, because right, because hookers are being killed, so go be the police officer. But what I like about those, you know, the last six episodes or the first season, those six they're clearly sort of figuring out the show, right and what the show is going to be.

And I think Meg Foster does a pretty good job. I don't have a problem with mic Foster. I find her pretty good, and yet there is something that pops in their relationship when Sharon Glass comes in. Because I like the first episode of season two as well, which starts in the middle of a sort of dramatic case of a person that's shot, and then there's a question of was there a gun? And I think Cagney saw a gun.

Lacy did not, and there's a big argument over you have to back me, and it's like, but I didn't see the gun. I can't say something that it wasn't true. It just is a really great way to kind of re establish who these characters are with a new actress playing Agney. But I don't know, it's interesting. I would love to get Meg Foster on this show someday.

That would be awesome. Love to hear what her thoughts were about her time on the show, and certainly hear about what she's done since. And I would love to get Barbara Corday on this show because she's got both this story and I'm sure a thousand other stories. You know, it's so interesting the timeline of this like it took so Barbara Avadon and Barbara Corday wrote Cagney Lacy and developed it with Barney for Barney because he wanted to do a buddy movie. Basically, he wanted to do a Butch, Cassie and Sundance kid with two women, and it ended up being Oh can you make them cops?

And as it gets developed, it basically turned into the Cagney and Lacy TV movie. But I mean he tried to sell that as a movie, as a television show, as TV movie, and as he tells in our first episode with him, Part one, it wasn't selling and people didn't want it. Two women, what are crazy? Get out of here, Get out of my office? No, they were like yeah, okay no, But then they did want it at CBS for a TV movie.

But by that time Barbara Avadon Barbara Corday were no longer writing partners, and Barbara Corday in fact, was in television development so she could help. And so I think basically Barney and Barbara Avadon wrote that script, but Barbara Aviadon and Barbara Corday were credited with it because they wrote various versions of that script. And this is again based on what Barney has said in the book. And then when they say, Okay, we're going to make the show. Barbara Corday is now a vice president at Columbia Television and so again she's going to act as a consulting producer.

But she can't be on the ground with that show. So he hires Barbara Avadon. But Barbara Avadon freaks out about the time frame because he's also promised to deliver scripts in a very tight time frame and they don't even know quite how they're going to make this as a show. So she actually sort of basically calls above him, does the thing you can't do, which is leap over your producer and talk to the studio or the network and say, oh, this is not going to happen. And so she ends up fired, right, And then Barney has no women on his team really or a show about two women.

And I will say, over the course of that show, what he did do is put women on the team. And Barney is such an interesting person because he's such a conundrum. He is old school Hollywood producer, like he is going to push hard, he is going to use whatever he's got. He is going to sort of ride the horse past the time that it's up down like it just nope, it's still going. We're still going to keep this alive.

He's going to work it all the way beyond the end and win the day. And yet he created arguably the most feminist show on television in nineteen eighty two and continued to deliver on putting women in places of power, both behind the scenes and in front of that show. And that's huge. The number of women, as we said, it seems small, but compared to even now, it's pretty good. The numbers that we talked about with Sharon Glass the Sharon Glass episode, out of forty two directors listed on IMDb, thirteen female directors.

That's a thirty one percent ratio at the time, unprecedented, and a number of them did multiple episodes. It's not like it was coming direct an episode see you later. Yeah, Yeah, they kept they kept coming back. Yeah. And out of eighty one writer thirty women almost forty percent again yesterday, that's a pretty great number.

Like, that's a pretty great percentage. And like you said, women got more than one episode. He basically you had to be talking to every working female director in Hollywood at the time, and saying are they available, do they want to come on this show. So the notable directors female directors. Karen Arthur of course, who we had on right for this show.

I love her, I know it's great. She did eight episodes of Cagney Lacy won an Emmy for Heat. Sharon Miller actually did ten episodes of Cagney and Lacy. She's also a director on the paper Chase, La Law, China Beach, The Trials of Rosie O'Neill, She's in the Family, and That's Life. She did several episodes of That's Life.

Oh and what I also forgot is the pilot was directed by Tyne Daily's husband, George Stanford Brown, who directed five episodes of Cagney and Lacy. I do love the little like, Okay, we're all in the family. You're in the family, you're in the family. Let's go. And you know, it wasn't until we started doing this podcast, in the first round of looking into Cagney and Lacy, that I realized that he was a director.

I knew him from the show he was on, so I knew he was an actor, but I did not know he was a director as well. I think I knew he was a director too, because of looking up like the rookies, and because I think he had directed some I don't know, I just sort of did know. I didn't realize he had directed as much as he's directed, like he is as much a director as an actor. Yeah, pretty amazing. And then the writers on this show, Georgia Jeffries, you know, two Emmy nominations for writing on Cagney and Lacy also went on to write for China Beach won two Writers Guilds Awards for Cagney and Lacy episodes.

Pretty amazing writer who started with a spec for this show. I think she was writing specs, so she may have written a couple of other specs, but you know, came onto the show as a writer's room writer after writing a spec for this show. And then Sharon Elizabeth Doyle was a playwright who became a TV writer, worked on Cagney Lacy and then twenty one Jump Street and the Nero Wolf Mysteries. I have to say, I do like the number Sharons that are on this show. There's a plethora of them.

There's a lot of Sharons. You're right, I did. I'm saying it, and I didn't even recognize it. A lot of Sharons, all right, Shelley List with her husband and business partner Jonathan Estrin, were big TV writers and producers, but significant for this show as well April Smith, Patricia Greene, and then a lot of what's interesting is both for Remington Steele and this show and a little bit for Scarecrow. A lot of those TV writers actually went on to become novel lists, including Peter le Court and April Smith, who wrote four episodes of Cagney and Lacy, along with many other eighties TV shows, who went on to write the books be The One and Good Morning Killer, which she then adapted into a TV movie in twenty eleven.

She also happened to write the remake movie version of Taking a Poem one, two three. So the mystery writers clearly went on to do mystery novels, you know, which makes sense, But they also you saw names in that show, not just in the writer director level, but also in a lot of positions that you didn't necessarily see on other shows. And it makes a huge difference the way you get work as a directors directing television episodes, and so the more work you do as a television director, the more work you can get, and so being able to do five episodes of Cagney and Lacy makes a huge difference to the rest of your career than doing one, because someone's got to open that door for you and say, come on in, show us what you got.

Yeah, and Karen Arthur sort of credits the Emmy with, you know, doing Cagney and Lazy, that she did the episode that got her an Emmy, and that Emmy opened more doors for her. And so that Emmy was for Heat, which we talk about on on that episode a little bit more. But it was Sea. Oh, it was Susan five, episode two. But it was originally shot to be the first episode of that season.

I do know that. But it starts without the opening credits because it's a very serious episode, and so I think they moved it to the second. It was such an unusual, stylistically different show from the rest of the show that they decided not to open the season with it. Yeah, it had no B story or C story. It was just this story with Lacy getting essentially kidnapped or held hostage by this alleged bank robber killer.

I can't remember exactly what crime he committed an unstable personality with a gun played by Michael Madison and held hostage by dangerous man. And if you went, oh, this was in one take, one shot, you'd believe it because it has that feeling of claustrophobia. It's not shot like that, but you know from the start of that episode that it's being shot very differently. New cinematographer had come on the show, and that's where Karen met that new cinematographer that she ended up marrying, Tom Newworth. Tom new Worth, Yes, was the new DP brought on the show.

Because by this point I believe that Sharon Glass and Barney Rosens we're having an affair, and previous to that affair, or maybe even during, Sharon Glass had been dating the previous cinematographer of the show, Hector Figaroa, the DP for thirty five episodes of Cagney and Lacy. Yes, they and they both talk about these in their books and are very forthcoming. Yeah, and take a lot of responsibility for these choices of theirs. The behind the scenes on this show is very interesting, you know. So Barney and barbercraw Day were married until kind of the middle of this show.

I think around season two or three their marriage ends, and then later Barney would go on to Mary Sharon Gless and they are still married. Yes, And so a lot of very interesting behind the scenes on this show, and yet they just sort of kept going on the show. And I have to say, everybody's very adult about it now. I'm sure there was a lot of things going down at the time, but it's a high pressure environment that television making. Television production is a runaway train.

It starts up, yeah, and it it doesn't stop for anything. It just keeps going forward. By this time, also BARBERA. Corday was the head of Columbia Television, President of Columbia Television. So again some high powered people doing high powered stuff.

But I don't know, it's just such an interesting show and I'm so glad that it ended up running and that Barney ended up fighting so hard for it to become the show it could become, and that women all over the country recognized it, you know. And he talks a little bit about that about getting people to write in for the show. But now and the National Organization for Women and and several television activists which were starting up at that time actually wrote in for the show. And there's a woman Dorothy Swanson, and she organized the Save the Cagnet Lacy campaign, or was one of the ones at organize that besides Barney. And then she founded Viewers for Quality Television and helped multiple television shows stay on the air.

I think that season one and two it was on the chopping block. Season two to three it was again on the chopping block, and then it was sort of allowed to kind of exist, I think, which is crazy. They're just are no words. This show is high quality television. It's winning award after award afterward, and yet the networks kind of like, I don't know, do we really want to keep it around?

Okay, I don't know what more you want? CBS, come on? Well, I think you know, television was both the same and different, right, Like, you know, you had to craft a season, and you were making a lot of guesses as to what was going to work within that where you were going to schedule it, and you know, I mean the scheduling of this show in its first season almost killed it by putting it after Magnum p I, which you would go, biggest show on TV. Let's go. Everybody watches the show everybody who's young, everybody who wants to look at hot people living crazy lives with Ferraris in Hawaii.

Sure, they're gonna like the adult two women in realistic crime stories. Like looking at it now, you're like, that would be in why where would you ever schedule it that way? But at the time you're like, oh, there's a hot show, we're gonna put it behind another hot show. Detectives. Detectives.

Fine, what's completely different shows like completely different audiences. Yeah, and the audience is important. You gotta find your audience. But once they did and it was it was a great, big hit, Okay, I yeah, that's what. That's what always when it was yeah, and listen, I understand enough to know that it's it's not always about the ratings.

It's not always it's not always about how good the show and all those other things. At the end of the day, it is about the bottom line and that and not to mention other people's thoughts and feelings about people that make decisions, their thoughts and feelings about shows, which decisions they make that aren't always about what is the best show. It's just it's usually about it's often about something else. Entirely. Yeah, and then you, you know, read about less moon bows and you realize, like, it's often about things that have nothing to do with even the best decisions or different decisions, or adult decisions or business decisions, but have to do with somebody who should not be in charge of anything.

Exactly now that we're saying that had anything to do with this, But no, I don't. I don't think he was there yet but still at Warner Brothers. But I don't know who is. But again, CBS, and I'm sure I don't know what they did or didn't do. I used to pretend that people like that, people who were in charge.

I used to think, like, oh, at some point, if you're in charge, you're successful, you must know what you're doing. But I think we have proven that that is not true, and that in fact, most of the time you don't know. Yes, And certainly experience has taught us both that just because they're in charge doesn't mean they have any idea what they're doing. None. All right, So what are you some of your other favorite episodes of this show?

Well, you know, that's interesting. I had a hard time coming up with favorite episodes. I kept coming back to favorite moments, favorite scenes, maybe favorite storylines, because it all just sort of seems to be one long show almost to me. But I think one of the most amazing things, if not the most amazing thing that I saw in this show, was in part two of Turn Turn Turn, which is at the end of season six, when Cagney has to come to terms with the fact that yes, she, like her father, is an alcoholic. And the scene between Cagney and Lacy when Lacy comes to her apartment after she's just been on this two day bender after her father passes away, that scene, it's like, it felt like it was like twenty minutes and it's just the two of them in this room together, and it was astonishing, absolutely astonishingly acted, astonishingly written, and I get goosebumps when I think about it.

Yeah, the both of those episodes, Turn Turn Turn Part one and Turn Turn Turn Part two, they're just again one these kind of amazing they're almost movies, like, you know, and and and you know, of course television can do that does that now very well in some ways, but at the time in the eighties, television was one thing and movies were another thing. And there's something very movie like about these episodes of Cagney and Lacy and that they're taking time with these scenes very much said they're very very character and you're right, and I don't know how she did I don't know how Sharon Gleats did that. I don't know how she did that, because that whole episode was her just drunk out of her characters, drunk out of her mind and going through all this yeah, and really swinging from angry too sad to belligerent, yeah, and violent, bitter and very specifically like it's really again a beautiful scenes, very tough scenes.

And then the season ends, and the episode ends with Cagney at an AA meeting saying she's an alcoholic because Lacy's basically say this is over unless you face this and that you can and I will help you. Yeah, and that, you know, again, was very groundbreaking at the time that a female character lead of a show would basically say I'm an alcoholic and we're going to stay with them, and then they're dead, like you know, and then they come back in the next season, and then she's going to AA meetings and is trying to be a non drinking alcoholic and be a cup and you know, solf cases. Yeah, and it's pretty it's a pretty great flavor for that show because it's now sitting there for those characters, right.

And I do love the first part, part one of Turn Turn Turn, where Lacy meanwhile, Lacey has saved a baby from an exploding car, a car wreck that then she grabs the baby before the car explodes on fire and becomes like a local celebrity and is being lauded. And meanwhile, Cagney's losing her dad and sort of diving into this bender. So the contrast of that of like, you know, Lacy's career is going up and Cagney's career is going down and that makes her bitter towards Lacy and not willing to have help at the beginning, I think, Yeah, it's so rich and so built on all of the years we've been watching these characters together and watching their lives and everything else that they've gone through and been through, and it's just it's it's really astonishing.

And I love seeing Harvey always dressed up in um he's always wearing a kitchen apron. He is often wearing a kitchen apron. Yes, I just love that about her. He's always wearing the kitchen apron. Yeah, and always worried about dinner as well, right, Like, which huge ground, but that makes him the greatest husband and possibly ever ever.

Yeah, And he's very understanding and he wants her to do what she needs to make her Even when he disagrees with Lacy, He's like, well, you have to make that decision. I mean, this is what I think, but you have to make that decision, and I will back you even if I don't agree with you. You know, in a lot of ways, that relationship between the two of them is probably the best, if not one of the best relationships between a married couple that I've ever seen on television. I mean, they know how to fight. They certainly are hot for each other from beginning to end.

You know, they trust each other. They there's just a level of love and trust, the maturity that you just don't see between couples because maybe because at some point they think they have to break them up, or they have to be something other than a united front for there to be enough drama in the show, or something. I don't know. John Carlin, who played Harvey, was really just quite spectacular at like, he feels like a guy's guy, and yet he's also shifting to adapt to his wife being a cop and something that was not necessarily part of what, you know, what he signed up for. And not only a cop, but for off and on throughout the years, she was the breadwinner.

Yeah, because the work he was doing either had physical challenges so he couldn't work, or there wasn't work or whatever, and she was the one that was bringing home the paycheck, which then, and I'm sure in some quarters now is a huge deal. And especially for a blue collar guy. Yeah. Yeah, you know, he's a construction guy who has lost work and then he's got tenitis and so then he can't work on the high building, so he can't do the job he has been doing for years. And again it's something small, but it's something that's so realistic to people's lives that you're like, how did that show exist?

You're sometimes like, how did this show actually exist? I think for a lot of couples that became a couple that you're like, oh, we're supportive of each other and supportive of this unit that we're building to get other. And it's a struggle and it's a negotiation, and yet it can be done. You know, it's another way television was teaching my things. Here's how to use a microwave, and here's what a a functional dysfunctional but trying to be functional relationship is, right, Like, that's navigating difficulty and that was important to see.

Yeah, it's important to see. Oh, here's a way to do it, and here's what it looks like to try to be a supportive ally in your marriage, in your relationship. Yeah, I just it's very interesting. You know, he passed away I want to say, like twenty nineteen twenty, not that long ago, really, Yeah, and because I looked to see about getting him on the show, because I thought that would be great. But he was very proud of the show.

And Yeah, for some reason, I would have thought, if I had had to guess, it would have been much earlier than that. I'm glad it wasn't. But I'm sorry. We obviously couldn't get him on the show. It was twenty twenty, so it was yeah, and just like and then the cast was just sort of interesting, and most of that cast came from the TV movie.

Like I'm going to give Barney another credit for basically being loyal, Like if he could get him back. He got him back, Carl Lumley as Mark Petrie, Al Waxman as Lieutenant Samuels, Martin Cove as is Becky Victory as Becky, and Sydney Clute as a detective LaGuardia and Sydney Klute passed away during the show, Lieutenant LaGuardia. He was the guy with the bow tie. Yeah, very very recognizable character actor, I think, and Richard said, I think he were the same outfit in every television show. But he he was in like, you know everything, He was in a Chips and Battlestarkly Original Battlesdark Galactica and Charlie's Angels and you know, just everything.

And he passed away during the show, but they kept his name in the credits for the whole show, for all the seasons. That's awesome. Yeah, so I really love that, you know that it felt like a family in a lot of ways. Oh and I Oh, one of the things I want to talk about before we sort of wrap up is number one on the call sheet and what happened with that. So obviously TV Movie Time Daily wasn't she had done stuff, but she wasn't incredibly well known.

She was known in theater and she had done some television Loretta Switt, huge star. Yeah, everybody knew her offmash Yeah, she was number one on the call sheet. It was a Loretta Switt TV movie also starring Time Daily. But Time Daily didn't I mean Time Daily held her own in that she doesn't have as much screen time and that's a shame because you wanted to be more Partnery. I think at the end it became more Lauretta Switt e.

But yeah, anyway, the TV movies that But when the show comes on, Tyne Daily is the more well known one. Mac Foster is not. Tyn Daily is number one on the call sheet for season one, Mac Foster goes away, Sharon Glass is brought onto the show. Sharon Glass is a bigger star than Tyn Daily at the time because she had starred in several television shows by that point and was better known and basically, you know, was supposed to get top billing and was supposed to get a certain rate. So they bring Times right up to mats Sharon's so they make the same money.

But now there's a big discussion on who's going to be both number one on the call sheet. But the first name right, and they both deserve it right, So they hashed it out. I mean, Barney was part of this, but as my understanding is that they hash it out and Daily. Yeah, Sharon sort of alludes to this in her interview where she's like, well, and then then you know, Time came over, brought champagne and we you know, we worked it out. We worked out some credit, saying but it's fine, and then she kind of moves on.

But I believe it was a huge discussion and a huge thing because being that number one means the next thing, you're a number one, like getting to these levels in Hollywood is a pay rate and your next job. It's where you start for your next job. Yeah, it was its emotion for Daily, but it wasn't so what they did. You'll notice that often their names are on at the same time, and then when they're not, they rotated. So one episode, we'll have Sharon's name first and then Time, and then the next episode was supposed had to have Time's name and then Sharon's, so they technically shared it.

And yet I don't know who is actually number one in the call sheet. Maybe if it depending on you know, one episode this one, maybe on for that episode on the call sheet there number one. Maybe they flipped number one on the call Yeah, and then the next episode when it's Sharon Glass, who's who's number one on the number one on on screen, she's number one on the call sheet. I mean that would in some ways make sense. I mean it'd be a little confusing for everybody, but still very confusing.

Yeah, I think for the crew, you know, and how you put down the Yeah. Yeah, No. I thought that was very interesting because my guess is that hopefully these two women were some of the highest paid women in television at the time this show ended. I hope so too, And what women get paid still to this day is less on average than what men get paid. Yep, and particularly in television, and for women of color, it's worse, like embarrassingly, so like they should publish thanks to make sure that people know how absurd it is.

But I think it was very important that both these women take the stand for their position and sort of vary in keeping with the show, right. Yeah. Marybeth Lacey wasn't as ambitious as Christine Cagney, but she was determined to be the best cop, as good as christ Like she would hold her service up right, like it was of it was equal value. You know, she didn't have to be like, I don't have to be lieutenant. I'm going to put him a time, but I will never be a lesser cop than you, right, which I thought was such an again for women to have both of those models of Yeah, you can be ambitious and you can want to be number one at the call sheet and number one you get.

You want to go all the way to the president of Coca Cola or Columbia Television, go for it. Be that, or you just want to make something really cool or be a cop and that is at the highest level of your job, yeah, and respected for it. Yeah. So that's what that show really gave us is two models, and every other show is giving us one model, if that right, every other female driven show of the time. I mean, as great as Remington Steel is, Laura Holt is on her own.

She is not in partnership with another woman on that show. Even when there's another woman on that show, right, She's not working in partnership with that other woman. Scarecrow, Missus King, Kay Jackson is not working in partnership with another woman. She and Francine are both agents, but they are not working in partnership on that show, you know. And then Golden Girls are all friends.

It's great. I would say, designing women is the only thing that might be there, and in some ways for me, being a sitcom, it's a little bit less, which may not be fair. Well, No, I think the drama versus comedy of it does make a difference. Yeah, mainly because of the stories they tell and how they tell them. Funny outweighs everything when they're in a comedy and not necessarily not in a drama.

Dramas can be both, I mean sitcoms can be both too, and yeah, comedies can be both, but the comedy is what drives thing drives the story in the comedy, at least it's opposed to anyway. Well, this has been amazing. We could talk clearly about Cademy and Lacy. Four days, yes, many many many more hours of the things to talk about. But like all good things must come to an end, at least for now.

I was excited to look at it again. I knew that I would like it, but didn't think I would find it as rich. I didn't either, as as I did. And then the episodes if you haven't listened to them and you just started with us. Go check him out.

We interview Barney Rosen's wag Sharon Glass, Tyne Daily, and director Karen Arthur. Yeah, and they're all just incredible. All right, So we're gonna take a little break and come back. We'll be right back, all right, Sharon, Welcome back. In today's audiography, we'd like to shout out Cagney and Lacy Appreciation Facebook group.

Lots of cool people there who love the show. And we have a special guest, our Eighties TV Ladies theme song singer and creator. Thank you for dropping by. Amy Engelhardt. Hello, Yeah, nights to he meet you.

Well, we've met in person, which is how I met. Yes, we met through our mutual friend Kat Cheryl, currently musical director on Hamilton tour. And then I found out that you were in the Bobs, an a cappella group that Sharon and I both know about because of our mutual friend Brittany, and so we were like, oh, oh, we're getting her on the show. Oh she's going to be writing our song. I'm a longtime big fan of Bob's so thrilled when Susan mentioned that you would be working on the songs for the show.

So very very very nice to e meet you as well. Oh how cool is that? I have to say that it was my honor and a privilege to continue their demented legacy, to both inherit it and continue it and warped minds moving forward. Well, and speaking of warped minds moving forward, I was so excited you said yes to creating the theme song for eighties TV Ladies, And when I said, hey, we might do some other crazy songs, you were like, let's go. Hello.

That's my life is doing crazy music, is doing theater music and silly staff and parodies and stuff like that. And I wish we could do them for every episode, but we have to be selective about what songs we create. But ades TV Ladies, which was you know, the kickoff and is so sticky. People are very very both happy and sad. How sticky that song?

This? Well, it's funny because when we richly talked about it, you had had an idea of how the riff might go, and all I could think of was when I read your lyrics was it's a living and you know, like, aren't we cool with our shoulders up to hear suits, yeah, you know, and designing women and all the things that of course I was watching I was in my teens. Well, hopefully we'll be having you back to create some more for season two, but meanwhile you're going to do something huge and you're going to have a show in the Edinburgh French Festival, I would argue, the most famous French festival in the world. Tell us about your one woman show, Impact the bombing of Pan. I'm one h three over Lockerbe, Scotland in nineteen eighty eight.

I'm a Yerocase University alum and thirty five Cherokee students from that plant. I had done the program three years before it, and so I knew five of the people went, both in the drama department. My show is called Impact, and it is about the decision to follow these over thirty five different coincidences and kind of magical whinings up and connections to Lockerbee, to say yes and to be rewarded on the trip with a discovery of the best in people in the worst of circumstances. It is not a musical, but it does have five pieces of music in it, and I play piano and I'm also accompanied by a cello and percussion, and there's projections and videos and like a multimedia scrapbook of the journey. Ultimately, it amounts to asking the question impact, what can we all do for each other in the face of tragedy, and how can we make the world better for each other when it isn't going to stop being worse?

What can anyone do who isn't like a world leader moving forward? I think it was mister Rogers who famously said look for the helpers, and Impact is a celebration of the helpers. Wow. So I am honored to be taking it to the Edinburgh Festival. And if you told you that I would be doing something like this the thermal I right comedy.

You know. I'm a hard asked check from New Jersey who has a potty mouth, but I can still read that. I just want to point out these two being darknot ritually exclusive. We contain multitudes, continue altitudes. Amy, thank you, and I'll be in the opening weekend in jarn of the National Women's Theater Festival in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Fantastic. Then I will be taking it to Edinburgh, and I have actually launched a campaign to help fund it. Awesome so yeah, I am funding it to a company called Fractured Atlas, which behaves as a five oh one C three So that means that when people contribute to a production such as Impact going to Edinburrow specifically, they get a tax deduction for their contribution. So you can find out more at fundraising dot fractured atlas dot org slash Impact and it will be in the description in our audioography awesome as will Amy Engleheart dot com and Facebook dot com slash Impact thirty three zero in which you can follow the journey to Edinburgh. I bet yeah.

I have talkbacks after every performance and the things that people have shared have been amazing, and gosh, if I can turn things around for people for even fifteen minutes, for them to be thinking in a more positive way, that's really rewarding. That's what we need right now. I think we need theater more than ever because it's that connection. If you are an artist listening to this podcast, you should know that Fractured Atlas dot org is actually open to individual artists as well as small organizations who need a five or one C three sponsor. They also provide other elements in support of artists and that can be from dance to visual art.

I believe to a theater and music, and I think what what makes Fractured Atlas stand out is that their mission is to serve artists and to serve arts organizations. So it's great, Well, this has been great. We could talk all day. We'll have you back on the show so we can talk about how it went in Edinburgh and then also more about eighties television and songwriting. Maybe I would love to talk about that.

Oh, I'm very happy to be here, and congratulations on the first season. Thank you, have a great time in Edinburgh, Scotland. Scotland's yeah, well that'll be in August, so we'll see you see before then. Great, fantastic, okay, coo cool, all right, so plenty of time for people to go help Amy get to Scotland. Excellent.

Thank you so much to you guys. We want to wish you a happy Mother's Day from Sharon and I at Eighties TV Ladies. In honor of this holiday, we want to shout out a special Motherday episode. We recommend checking out the Mother's Day episode of Golden Girls, Season three, episode twenty five, where the girls who are all mothers themselves recall past mother's Days. It's kind of sweet.

That sounds wonderful. So we all say Happy Mother's Day together. Oh yeah, well, let's set you two, okay, Happy Mother's Day. Send us your audiography, send us your favorite Eighties TV Ladies books, websites and shows. Thank you all for listening and for making our first season of Eighties TV Ladies just spectacular.

We love getting your feedback and we love your support. It has been so great. It's been such an amazing journey to do this show, and it just keeps getting better and better. Your support helps us make more episodes, whether that's alike in comment on social media, a rating, a review on Apple podcast, or supporting us monthly on patreon dot com slash eight tv Ladies. We so appreciate the love, the support and the conversation.

We want to thank Sullivan Lewis and Sean Gilleska at Concept Lab Marketing the Nineties TV Babies, Sarta Fontanessi, Sergio Perez and Megan Ruble, Chris Stashu for being our friend, and Chris and Mike White at weirding Way Media. Eighties tv Ladies is produced by one thirty four West and Susan Lambert HadAM. Our producers are Richard Haddam and Melissa Roth. Sound engineer and editor is Kevin Doocey. Assistant sound work provided by Izzie Galishaw, and our associate producer is Sergio Perez.

Our theme song is by Amy Englehart. Our next episode will be the first of season two. I can't believe we're already at season two. It's crazy. Please join us as we kick off our season two with the Degree in Advanced TV Hestory.

We'll be bringing on podcasters Cynthia Beamis Abrams to talk eighties television and women making her story. We hope Eighties TV Ladies brings you joy and laughter and lots of fabulous new and old shows to watch, all of which will lead us forward toward being amazing ladies of the twenty first century. See you next season. Fitzy and So Pretty The City