I just finished reading a wonderful book called Cagney & Lacey…and Me: An Inside Hollywood Story by Barney Rosenzweig, who produced all seven seasons of the seminal TV show about two women who were police officers (rather than two cops who were women--there's a big difference). The 387-page book is published by the print-on-demand company iUniverse ($22.95 paper, ISBN 978-0-595-41193-1) and became available in May to tie-in with the DVD release of the first season of Cagney & Lacey starring Tyne Daly and Sharon Gless.
Just as William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade is considered a bible for screenwriters, Rosenzweig’s new memoir offers a Master Class for television producers. Backtracking only briefly to set up his credentials (his 1980 miniseries John Steinbeck’s East of Eden was an Emmy winner, while his stint producing 11 episodes of Charlie’s Angels was “the worst experience of my professional life in Hollywood”), the bulk of this compulsively readable and audaciously entertaining autobiography deals with producing Cagney & Lacey (plus the original TV movie that starred Loretta Swit and Daly and the four TV movies that Gless and Daly made after the show was cancelled).
The female cop show was a family affair: it was co-created by Rosenzweig’s then-wife Barbara Corday and co-starred Gless, who would become his wife after the show ended. A critical success (during its run, Daly won a leading actress Emmy for her role four times while Gless won twice; and the show won Best Drama Series twice), the show gained a foothold with audiences and the media thanks to Rosenzweig’s close relationship with pro-feminists contacts. Gloria Steinem's Ms. magazine took the show under its wing early on with a cover story written by feminist film historian Marjorie (Popcorn Venus) Rosen about the original 1981 TV movie. The article was followed by an addendum by Steinem, inviting readers, "If you would like to see Cagney & Lacey expanded into a television series..." followed by instructions on where to write. It worked.
CBS ordered six episodes and Loretta Swit (who was still working on M*A*S*H) was replaced by Meg Foster as Christine Cagney. With unspectacular ratings, the show was cancelled. Bowing to the networks insistance on recasting Meg Foster and Rosenzweig's promise to be a coupon-clipper on the show's budget, the network relented and ordered more episodes for a second season. The second season (which was just released on DVD, altho carefully billed as "The True Beginning") brought Sharon Gless onboard as Christine Cagney, the third actress to play opposite Daly's MaryBeth Lacey.
Despite the fact that Daly won an Emmy award for this season, CBS cancelled the show. This time, Rosenzweig organized a grass-roots letter-writing campaign where he invited fans to save the show by not writing to the network, but to their local newspapers and the Los Angeles Times and New York Times. The fans forced the network to admit it was wrong and brought the show back again.
There’s still plenty of drama ahead with network interference, star egos, writers’ strikes, lawsuits, corporate takeovers, and on-the-set affairs but Rosenzweig holds his narrative reins tight and is an illuminating and sanguine tour guide to the treacherous landscape of network television.
If MGM's DVD branch had the ingenuity of Rosenzweig, they'd buy up copies of this book to plastic-wrap together with the next season release of Cagney & Lacey and create a real value package that no Cagney & Lacey fan would want to miss.
