THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT WASN’T

Year’s end, and my copy of Variety announced a listing of the top 100 television series of all time. A lot of great stuff has occurred in the world of entertainment since my tenure with Daniel Boone, The Trials of Rosie O’Neill, Christy, John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and last, but really at the top of my oeuvre, Cagney & Lacey.

Modest fella that I am wont to be, I began my surveying of the best of the best at the end of the list with an eye to working backward from #100 to #1. I reasoned that there have been a lot of great series since my days in the business, from The Sopranos (#3 according to Variety) to Game of Thrones (#21). Still, I figured that at the very least my female cop series would be somewhere north of #75 and that I would find it being listed within the turn of a few pages from back to front.

It was at the very end of the listings that I soon realized there was little chance of Cagney & Lacey being early on in that last quadrant. For God’s sake, Homeland was listed as #98. Any list I would have prepared would have that compelling Showtime series easily in the top 10… maybe in the top 5. Two shows I had never heard of… Hannibal and Community… were the only ones listed below the brilliant spy drama starring Claire Danes, Damian Lewis, and Mandy Patinkin.

Deadwood, arguably the best series ever made by anyone, let alone the vaunted HBO, was #74. I sagged. No wonder no one had called to congratulate me and my shows with well more than a dozen Emmy Awards (including… I hasten to add… two for best dramatic series). Unbelievably, Cagney & Lacey was nowhere to be found on this list of television’s all-time best 100.

I will not give you the complete list from the “bible of show business,” but here are some of the shows that beat out Cagney & Lacey AND Homeland:

Survivor, Jeopardy, ER, Enlightened, The Real World, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Office, Gilmore Girls, BoJack Horseman, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Chappelle’s Show, The Comeback, Grey’s Anatomy, Living Single, Battlestar Galactica, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, General Hospital, Daria, St. Elsewhere, Will & Grace.

There are some decent shows in that part of the Variety list, despite the fact I put them together here for the purposes of derision. I readily concede that, but really? Better than the ground breaking Cagney & Lacey or the Shakespearean Deadwood? At least the latter got mentioned. I mean, am I out of line here?

General effing Hospital? Jeopardy? Are they kidding me? C’mon. I am ready for my close-up and it just ain’t happening.

St. Elsewhere was a wonderful show. I know because it was on Network television during the same time as Cagney & Lacey and I remember taking considerable pride that my show received 36 Emmy nominations and 14 wins while Tom Fontana’s hospital show had but 4 nominations, garnering 3 wins.

Cagney & Lacey was feted by the Congress of the United States, the State of California and the Cities of New York and Los Angeles. Every one of the six years the show was on the air, either Tyne Daly or Sharon Gless won the Emmy as best actress in a dramatic series. To this day, no other show anywhere can compete with the record established by these two thespians. To my knowledge, no CBS dramatic series before or since has received more honors than Cagney & Lacey.

But enough about me and mine. The Fugitive is not listed by Variety… nor is Barney Miller. Quinn Martin and Danny Arnold must be turning in their respective graves. They credit The Good Fight but not The Good Wife which was the show that not only made The Good Fight possible, but also was much more of a true groundbreaker of a series. No mention of Orphan Black or The Morning Show, Designing Women, or Murphy Brown.

I agree with their assessment of The Americans (#42), but how can you name that FX series and not put Justified on that same list? No Gunsmoke? No Marvelous Mrs. Maisel? Not a nod to The Bear?

The “bible of show business”? Sacrilege.

 

Barney Rosenzweig