I was just trying to think of some shows that I really enjoyed watching. Some of the shows stand out more than others. I remember that a cable channel (in the U.S.) showed one of my all-time favorite police shows a few years ago. The channel aired the shows every weekday, at the same time, and I had my VCR programmed to get every last one of those shows… Now I’m sorry that I didn’t keep the VHS tapes. (Of course, I would have had to keep our VCR hooked up!)
“Cagney & Lacey” is one of the shows that I remember most fondly. I absolutely loved the comradeship of the two women… and I also loved how different they were. Sharon Gless (Christine Cagney) and Tyne Daly (Mary Beth Lacey) could not have been better cast as these two diverse women. (Sharon Gless replaced Meg Foster… and even Loretta Switt in the role!) Cagney was the wise-cracking, brutally frank police officer…. single, with a private life that could not have been messier. Lacey, on the other hand, was the police woman who had to use tact to gloss over Cagney’s (almost) bull-headed ways…. She was married, with a very loving husband and children.
By the time the show aired I had already graduated from college, and had held jobs in the work force… But, my jobs didn’t have anything in common with the jobs that these two police officers had… They were tough women who always caught their man (or woman… whoever the culprit happened to be!) And, back in the early 1980s, I don’t remember a whole lot of shows where the two lead characters were women…. and tough and smart at that!
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Jill says
I also remember “Cagney and Lacey” very fondly, athough I haven’t revisited the series in years. It was one of the first shows to put “real” women into the key roles. Daly and Gless were not model types or what you would describe as conventionally pretty. But they were, nevertheless, attractive women in their own ways–who became more and more attractive as their characters evolved. As a former New Yorker, I recall its being very much a New York show–in terms of plot and dialogue. But its appeal definitely extended well beyond those boundaries. One of C&L’s strong points was that these characters didn’t start out being brilliant detectives. They often stumbled along the way–and grew into being highly skilled professionals (as well as more enlightened human beings) over the course of the series. At the time it was made, that represented a refreshing change from the hero who always gets it right. The series was followed–much later–by a Cagney & Lacey TV movie. That was a terrible disappointment. They should have left well enough alone.