![]() ![]() "His magnificent writing meshed with the personalities of the actors on the stage, and that's what made it a hit," he said. Danny told people at the network when they could come on his set."Ībe Vigoda, who played Detective Phil Fish, said Arnold observed the actors closely. Now things are done in a committee fashion. ![]() "It was necessary for Danny to work that way to get that result. Let’s all move on."It's not necessary for everybody to work that way to get a good result," Glass said. Linden says in a documentary that accompanies the DVD set. “He said, ‘I’m going to close the show,’ ” Mr. Arnold who did shut things down, when he felt the series began to cover the same ground every week. “The look on his face was so serious that we thought we were going to shut down.” “Danny held this script out like it was something he’d just pulled out of the trash,” Mr. One time he objected to the use of the term “olive loaf” because, he said, the detectives would never have anything to do with that particular luncheon meat. Flicker) was a perfectionist, prone to marathon taping sessions and obsessive rewrites. Arnold (who created the series with Theodore J. But he really knew how human beings interacted.” He was the opposite of Strasberg on every other level, with his cigars and pastrami sandwiches and racehorses. Gail recalled: “As far as his insight goes, I thought he was on a level with Lee Strasberg. “There was a piece of Danny in every character,” Mr. Linden said, of the mercurial executive producer and co-creator Danny Arnold, who died in 1995. Soo made the most poignant exit of all: After he died of cancer in 1979, his colleagues remembered him in a retrospective clip show, saluting him with their coffee mugs.īut the show did equally well with the droll know-it-all Dietrich (Steve Landesberg), the insecure Levitt (Ron Carey) and the gruff, rambling Inspector Luger (James Gregory). Vigoda lasted a year longer, departing to star in his own spinoff. Sierra left after the first two seasons, reportedly dissatisfied with his role. Unlike most prime-time fare “Barney Miller” flourished despite major cast upheavals. “Wojo curling that paper into the typewriter was what police related to - the lack of action.” “It was a radio drama,” said Frank Dungan, who with his writing partner, Jeff Stein, contributed many episodes. Rarely did we see anything that was actually happening outside the squad room. Instead, detectives came and went, rushing out to make arrests and dragging in perps. But the producers soon dropped that idea. As the series was originally conceived, half of each episode would take place on the job, and half at Miller’s home. The action on “Barney Miller” was as underplayed as its jokes. Wojo: “Sounds like your dad was a nice guy.” Rhonda: “He got me a little pennant, a hot dog and a beer. In “Call Girl,” a lady of the evening named Rhonda (Tasha Zemrus) tells Wojo about a ballgame to which her father once took her: “Hey,” Yemana mutters, “what do you say we guys go down to the beach and shoot some clams?” In one classic segment, pretty much the whole squad room gets stoned on hashish brownies. “Barney Miller” may have offered more low-key chuckles than any other show of the 1970s. The moral center was Captain Miller, played with consummate unflappability by Hal Linden. There was the elderly, cantankerous Fish (Abe Vigoda) the lethargic gambler Yemana (Jack Soo) the dapper, novel-writing Harris (Ron Glass) the insouciant, energetic Chano (Gregory Sierra) and the stubborn, guileless Wojo, short for Wojciehowicz (Max Gail). For one thing the detectives of the fictional 12th Precinct were authentic shoe-leather types. I could have gone onto that set, sat down and gone to work.”Įven a casual look back at “Barney Miller” (all 168 episodes are available on 25 DVDs from Shout! Factory) reveals the show to be simultaneously archetypal and atypical. ![]() “But I could turn on ‘Barney Miller.’ It filled a void for me. “I was uncertain if I could make it without the badge,” he said. An early fan of “Barney Miller” was Joseph Wambaugh, the author of novels like “The New Centurions” and nonfiction works like “The Onion Field.” He began tuning in shortly after stepping down as a Los Angeles Police Department detective sergeant, to write full time. ![]()
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