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.”

TV Quote of the Day (‘Barney Miller,’ On Getting Off on the Wrong Foot With an Eyewitness)

Detective Ron Harris [played by Ron Glass, pictured]: “Miss Jacobs? Hi, I'm Detective Harris. If you'll have a seat right over there, we'll be right with you.”

Miss Jacobs [played by Ivy Bethune]: "Both of you?”

Harris: “Uh, no, I meant me.”

Miss Jacobs: “Then say what you mean, for heaven's sake!”—Barney Miller, Season 5, Episode 29, “Quo Vadis?” original air date Mar. 2, 1978, teleplay by Tony Sheehan, directed by Alex March

TV Quote of the Day (‘Barney Miller,’ In Which Harris Learns the Limits of Literary Fame)

Louise Austin [A librarian, played by Miriam Byrd-Nethery]: “We have your book.”

Det. Ron Harris [played by Ron Glass]: “Oh, do you?

Louise: "Blood on the Badge—364.12 in the crime section.”

Harris: “Well uh, look, I certainly hope people are bringing it back on time.”

Louise: “It's never left.”— Barney Miller, Season 7, Episode 13, “The Librarian,” original air date Feb. 19, 1981, teleplay by Frank Dungan, Jeff Stein, and Tony Sheehan, directed by Noam Pitlik

TV Quote of the Day (‘Barney Miller,’ With a Rotten Way to Start the Day)

Capt. Barney Miller [played by Hal Linden]: [Just as he walks in the door, a gun is pointed at his face] “I hate starting the day off like this!”— Barney Miller, Season 1, Episode 1, “Ramon,” original air date Jan. 23, 1975, teleplay by Theodore J. Flicker and Danny Arnold, directed by Bill Davis

TV Quote of the Day (‘Barney Miller,’ on the NYPD During a Snowstorm)

Capt. Barney Miller [played by Hal Linden]: [to Fish] “What about the night shift? Are they going to make it?”

Det. Phil Fish [played by Abe Vigoda]: “I don't think so. The guys who live on Long Island can't get to Manhattan.”

Barney: “Well, that means the guys who live in Manhattan can't get to Long Island.”

Fish: “Right.”

Barney: “Why don't we call Long Island and have them keep the guys who can't get to Manhattan, and we'll keep the guys who can't get to Long Island?”

Fish: [shakes his head] “They tried it once and they didn't like it. It made too much sense.”— Barney Miller, Season 1, Episode 3, “Snow Job,” original air date Feb. 6, 1975, teleplay by Ron Friedman, Danny Arnold and Chris Hayward, directed by Richard Kinon

TV Quote of the Day (‘Barney Miller,’ As Dietrich Explains the Source of His ‘Outlook’)

Detective Arthur Dietrich (played by Steve Landesberg): "By my mid-teens the writings of Schopenhauer and Kant had begun to dominate my epistomological outlook."

Inspector Frank Luger (played by James Gregory): "I asked you if you had any pets!"

Dietrich: "Ant farm!"— Barney Miller, Season 7, Episode 20, “The Vests,” original air date May 7, 1981, teleplay by Nat Mauldin, directed by Noam Pitlik

Although the pilot for Barney Miller aired in August 1974, the first regular episode did not broadcast until 40 years ago yesterday, when beloved series regulars Jack Soo (Nick Yemana), Max Gail (Wojo), Gregory Sierra (Chano), and Ron Glass (Harris) appeared for the first time.

The showrunner was Danny Arnold, but it could just have been easily created by MTM Enterprises, which brought the urban-workplace series to a zenith in the ‘70s and ’80s with the likes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, WKRP in Cincinnati, Lou Grant and Hill Street Blues. Whether wry sitcom or gritty crime drama, these invariably involved steady middle managers handling eccentric co-workers as much as an outside world ready to go mad.

The calm center of Barney Miller was the title character, a captain of a Greenwich Village precinct blessed with experience, good humor and humane instincts. That helped him interface between his often wisecracking detectives and precinct visitors who, whether criminals or victims, turned out, more often than not, to be querulous or screwballs.

Miller’s sanity held the station house together, just as Hal Linden played straight man to some of the most accomplished supporting members of an ensemble in sitcom history, including Abe Vigoda, Glass, Gregory, Ron Carey, Soo, and Landesberg. 

In certain ways, despite its durability, Barney Miller has been neglected, coming as it did between groundbreaking social comedies of the early Seventies such as All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show and the overwhelmingly popular mid-Eighties mainstay The Cosby Show. It need not take a back seat to these other shows, however. Together with Taxi and WKRP, it provided some of the most consistently hilarious and intelligent programming of the late Seventies and early Eighties.

I didn’t learn until researching this post that Steve Landesberg, my favorite actor in the series, didn’t show up at all until the second season (his first appearance: a criminal masquerading as a priest), and it wasn’t till the fourth that his character began to be seriously developed. He turned out to be a gold mine.  

Landesberg was one of only three cast members (the others being Soo and Carey) who were primarily comic actors. He came by his timing in New York City comedy clubs, where he worked with the likes of Jimmie Walker and Freddie Prinze.

Imagine some sort of happy medium between the sometimes surreal Steven Wright and the often manic early Woody Allen and you’ll have the infinitely dry, deadpan delivery that Landesberg perfected as the infuriatingly intellectual Sgt. Arthur Dietrich. He had me at his first station-house exchange with a sleazy criminal defense attorney, who demands that the detective tell him "everything" he knows--meaning about his client. Dietrich’s response, one of the great understatements in TV history: “How much time you got?”

In a sense, the creation of Dietrich was part of the series’ instinct (not always successful) to get beyond stereotypes about the police. He was intellectual at a time when college students, still used to the rhetoric of counterculture clashes, regarded cops as far below their brain levels. At the same time, he was a favorite of many officers who, while they might not have understood Dietrich’s fascination with “Schopenhauer and Kant,” were glad to encounter a character who, in his disinclination to shoot his gun, mirrored an aspect of their lives that few outsiders understood. 

(For an excellent summary of why the show, in breaking with stereotypes, "deserves to be recognized as one of the standout series of the 1970s," please see this insightful interview with Fordham University professor Leonard Strate.)

Over the years, Landesberg made a number of guest appearances on The Tonight Show when Johnny Carson was host, and he continued to appear sporadically on TV and film. But the highlights of his career are still his more than 120 appearances over seven seasons on Barney Miller, which netted him three Emmy nominations. Sadly, he died in 2010 at age 74, having prepared, through Arthur Dietrich, sitcom viewers for a more intense (if narrow) intellectual: Dr. Sheldon Cooper of The Big Bang Theory.