Today's
Liz Smith column in the New York Post (registration required) and
Newsday offers a big nuggest of hope for fans of
Cagney & Lacey, who cannot wait to get that show home:
SIR HOWARD Stringer of Sony, once the head of CBS, and producer Barney Rosenzweig are working together on a 25th-anniversary DVD edition of the groundbreaking "Cagney & Lacey" TV series, which starred Tyne Daly and Barney's wife, Sharon Gless.
Very good, very cool news. The regular weekly series started in 1982, with an extremely short first season (just 6 episodes). Don't forget, though, that the October 1981 pilot telefilm was Gless-less, with the role of Cagney going to Loretta Swit. Swit was still in
M*A*S*H, though, in her unforgettable role of "Hot Lips Houlihan", and would be tied up there until 1983.
So the regular series role of Cagney went to...Meg Foster, joining Tyne Daly as Lacey. Meg Foster? Yep. She was then replaced at CBS's direction after that short first season. The reason the network reportedly gave was that the viewers had a hard time telling the two leads apart, and wanted to have a more striking physical difference between them. Since Daly had been there first (in the pilot), she got to stay. Plus, it wasn't Daly's first role as a tough street cop: five years prior she hit the big screen with Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry" character in
The Enforcer. So Foster left during the summer break, and Sharon Gless won the role of Cagney and debuted in that role for the beginning of the second season in October '82. Gless ended up marrying the show's producer, Barney Rosenzweig, in 1991 (several years after the series ended). Daly, of course, ended up most recently in
Judging Amy.
Crazy, convoluted stuff? Sure is. We can only hope that the DVDs are full of supplements (commentaries, interviews, behind-the-scene featurettes) that explain all the background on these changes...including the show's temporary cancellation in the Spring of 1983 (after the 22-episode second season), before returning a year later for a short (7 episode) 3rd season and go on for 4 more normal-length seasons. Yet it always won, from 1983 to 1988, the Emmy for "Outstanding Actress in a Drama Series" each year, for one of the two stars of the show...go figure.
Our thanks to reader Cecilia Wahl for the heads-up about Liz Smith's inside information. Stay tuned, and we'll bring you more about this, as soon as the studio makes that info available (it should be Sony, since Orion Television produced the show, and MGM owns Orion and Sony owns MGM).
