TV Quote of the Day (‘Barney Miller,’ As Fish Receives a Stupefying Retirement Gift)

Det. Phil Fish [played by Abe Vigoda] [opens his present]: “What is it?”

Det. Stan “Wojo” Wojciehowicz [played by Max Gail]: “It's a New York City municipal bond.”

[All the cops in the precinct stand silently aghast, until…]

Det. Sgt. Nick Yemana [played by Jack Soo] [horrified]: “Oh, my God.”

Fish [still trying to comprehend this]: “A New York City municipal bond?”

“Wojo”: “Yeah. Hey, it's worth a thousand dollars when it matures.”

Fish: “If it matures... in 1997... I would have been 83.”—Barney Miller, Season 4, Episode 2, “Good-Bye, Mr. Fish: Part 2,” original air date Sept. 22, 1977, teleplay by Reinhold Weege, directed by Danny Arnold
 
For reasons related to my school workload and the series’ prime-time schedule, I seldom saw Barney Miller during its eight-year run. With (somewhat) more leisure time now to catch its syndicated reruns, I finally caught up with this two-part episode on the retirement of Det. Fish.
 
Many baby boomers like myself are now facing the future confronting the lovable grouch of the NYPD 12^th Precinct. I was fully prepared for the poignancy of his goodbye (necessitated by Vigoda’s departure for a short-lived spinoff series involving Fish and his wife).
 
What I didn’t expect was Wojo’s going-away present for his comrade and friend. That inappropriate gift provoked a roar of laughter from the studio audience at the time, too.
 
No wonder: Less than two years before, New York’s plunge toward a bankruptcy filing—and the notorious New York Daily News headline it inspired (“Ford to City: Drop Dead”)—put Gotham on a brink from which it only narrowly stepped back from, though not without massive cuts in services and a sharp falloff in quality of life.
 
Nor did it help that only two months before this episode premiered, New York received another black eye: a nearly 24-hour blackout that led to a massive outbreak of looting.
 
The very survival of the city, then, was at stake when Wojo presented Fish with this gift—which meant, of course, that with no city, no maturity on that bond.
 
Barney Miller lasted nearly my whole time in high school and college, a period when New York struggled to climb out of its deep hole. The crazies that came like an unstoppable tide into the 12^th Precinct were just a sample of the collective insanity gripping the city.
 
At various points, it seemed like Barney and his staff were the only bulwarks against what Fish called “the trouble this city is in." In this retirement episode, the pressures of that fight seemed to get to Fish at last, as he came perilously close to abusing a suspect until Barney stepped in.
 
Three years after the sitcom went off the air, showrunner Danny Arnold was honored with the Writer’s Guild of America’s Paddy Chayefsky Award for his lifetime achievement in TV. 

While his sitcom was usually more genial than Chayefsky’s dyspeptic screen satires, the daily dilemmas of this stationhouse reminded me of a line from the latter’s Oscar-winning screenplay for The Hospital: “Among us middle class, love doesn't triumph over all—responsibility does.”