GOOD COMPANY

As readers of these notes have learned, Before and After Cagney & Lacey, will be released soon by McFarland and Company publishing house. The memoir covers just about everything in my life other than the materials from my first volume (Cagney & Lacey … and Me).

Why I so shamelessly call this to your attention is to reveal what is not so widely known … and that is the final motivating factor which got me to complete the book after having it languish … unfinished … in an unmarked drawer for nearly twenty years.

What got me off the beach and back in front of my word processor was an edition of Variety and its publication of “The 100 Greatest TV Shows of All Time.”

Nothing of mine made that list. Not the award-winning mini-series, John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, nor The Trials of Rosie O’Neill, nor the Peabody Award winning series, Christy.

Jeopardy is on that Variety list. So is something called Enlightened, along with Freaks and Geeks, Community, and the animated Bojack Horseman.

My iconic, award-winning series, Cagney & Lacey did not make that list of 100, but Top Chef, and General Hospital did.

Are you kidding me?

Please, do not get me started. The last time I got cranked up about this I turned out over 100,000 words, which in case you have forgotten while reading the last few paragraphs, you will soon be able to purchase by way of Amazon or wherever such things are sold these days.

Why do I bring this up now? Well, Variety is one thing, The New York Times, however … the widely proclaimed “Newspaper of Record” … is something else altogether.

In writing about the demise of late-night TV, brought about by the CBS cancellation of Stephen Colbert, the Times did a homage to the genre, mourning the loss. Was Jack Paar mentioned? No. A serious omission, but what, almost anyone of the age of majority might ask, what (I repeat) about Steve Allen!??? He only invented the format, the desk, the interviews, the monologue, the show itself. Mr. Allen was never mentioned. Talk about “Fake News.”

A week or so before this major failing, another NY Times piece came out listing “The 30 Greatest Living American Song writers” with not even an honorable mention for Billy Joel. Hello???  … “New York State of Mind” … the best song written in the last half of the 20^th century, the anthem for our nation’s signature city. Forget his other multiple megahits, that one song alone should enshrine Billy Joel forever in whatever list one might devise on the idiom.

I will stay away from the crazy making fact of Randy Newman not being mentioned, nor Joni Mitchell, nor Lady Gaga, nor Beyonce. I am no music maven, but 17 of the 30 in the NYTimes were names I had never before even heard.

Nevermind who is writing these songs … who is authoring these articles? Is it some twentysomething Generation G dude, or an AI device with a feed from no one born before 2001? It is a very good thing Hoagy Carmichael died years ago because if he were still alive, and the NY Times had excluded “Stardust” … as this article intimates would be more than likely … the fact of being so blatantly ignored, would surely have caused his heart to stop beating.

I know when I first perused the article of these living songwriters, I quickly checked my Google machine to see how it was I missed the obituary of Billy Joel for surely, I thought he could not still be among the living and be so dishonored.

And yet he was. And so was Steve Allen and so was Cagney & Lacey. At least my show finally wound up in good company.

 

Barney Rosenzweig