Roddenberry in the 1970s / 1977-1978 Superhero & Science Fiction TV Shows / Funniest SNL Skit Ever! / Prisoner: Cell Block H / Why John Amos Left Good Times / Reviving Match Game / How Betty White's 'Happy Hommaker' Came About / Remembering Cindy-Williams / Creating The Rockford Files / TV Dads Talk Sex & Fatherhood / Angie Dickinson Blows Off This Is Your Life / How Maude Came About / Rare Audio of Bette Davis' Broadway Bound Flop 'Miss Moffat' / Orson Welles' Last Interview / Remembering Ed Asner / Bruce Vilanch on Writing for Donny & Marie / Writing For Fernwood 2 Night / Kris Kristofferson vs Barbra Streisand on A Star Is Born? Kinda. On another occasion, a friend came into my office at ABC-Vine Street and said, ‘Hey, Reeder, want to go get some lunch?’ I pointed to the paper in my typewriter and said, ‘This script is on the stage-thanks anyway.’” Even so, the pace was frantic-on one assignment I was given 3 hours to write the story outline. My agent wisely turned down Danny's annual offers of staff jobs, negotiating freelance assignments (so-called "multiple deals") for me instead. They were the Barney Miller writing staff. Sitcom writer Tom Reeder described the stress of working on the show, “In the early years, Danny benefited from the heroic writing efforts of Chris Hayward, who was a veteran writer, and rookies Tony Sheehan and Reinhold Weege who, like me, didn't know any better. Barney Miller was one of the few sitcoms of the period that occasionally mentioned the then-current year. Producer Danny Arnold’s failing health also contributed, every script went through him for revisions until he suffered a heart attack.
That being said, Barney Miller finished it’s last season at #54, at the bottom of the ratings. The minute you have a show that’s a hit, the number 2 team, their agent is at every network… So you’re always losing your number 2 team every year. Five, maybe six writing sources, something like that. That is, they feed on themselves… We had, what, let’s say five writing sources. Sitcoms are by definition self destructive. “The next to last season was going to close it. “It was never canceled,” Linden told the Television Academy. The networks would take the best of the rejected batch and give them an airing in primetime during the summer when viewership was down, a way to get back some of the cost of that pilot.īasically, star Hal Linden insists, the end of Barney Miller came down not to ratings, but to keeping good writers who were constantly getting lured to other projects. The show grew out of an unsold television pilot, The Life and Times of Captain Barney Miller, airing in the summer of 1974, as part of an ABC summer anthology series, Just for Laughs, where the network would dump pilots they didn’t intent to pick up. Broadcast from January 23, 1975, to May 20, 1982, on ABC, Barney Miller is considered one of the best sitcoms of the 1970s.
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