Sunday, January 21, 2007

Sisters in Crime-Solving

Slowly but surely, DVD distributors are bringing out older TV crime dramas that are worth watching--The Rockford Files, The Streets of San Francisco, Hawaii Five-O, etc.--and that are way better than some of the other series that have already made this technological leap (did we really need to see Airwolf or Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. again?). Now, TV Squad brings news that Cagney & Lacey, the 1982-1988 series starring Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly as New York City police detectives, is finally heading for DVD.

However, it’s not yet clear when this set will reach stores, or exactly what it will contain. Will it feature only the series’ short first season? That might be a marketing problem, since when C&L debuted as a CBS-TV mid-year replacement in the spring of 1982, the role of Christine Cagney was occupied not by Gless, but instead by Meg Foster. (She had already replaced Loretta “Hot Lips” Swit, who filled the character’s heels in the 1981 series pilot film.) Gless didn’t join the cast until the fall of ’82, bringing with her a new, zippier main title sequence (see the contrast here versus here) and eventually helping to earn the series 14 Emmy Awards.

Does distributor Fox want to disappoint Cagney & Lacey fans by putting out only a debut season, without the show’s best-remembered co-star? Or might it release seasons one and two, for maximum impact? We shall see.

READ MORE:Gless Is Back to Television,” by Robert Bianco (USA Today).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What about Columbo?

J. Kingston Pierce said...

Yeah, that too. -- Jeff