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MEMORIES:
Hans Asperger remembers...Abe Vigoda who played Fish is NOT dead! But lots of people think he is. There's even websites on the ... More »
Posted on 04/07/08
PHOTOS:
Cast:
Detective Phil Fish (1975-77)...Abe Vigoda
Detective Sergeant Chano Amenguale (1975-76)...Gregory Sierra
Detective Stanley "Wojo" Wojohowicz...Maxwell Gail
Detective Nick Yemana (1975-78)...Jack Soo
Detective Ron Harris...Ron Glass
Elizabeth Miller (pilot only)...Abby Dalton
Elizabeth Miller (1975-76)...Barbara Barrie
Rachael Miller (1975)...Anne Wyndham
David Miller (1975)...Michael Tessier
Bernice Fish (1975-77)...Florence Stanley
Detective Janice Wentworth (1975-76)...Linda Lavin
Inspector Frank Luger...James Gregory
Officer Carl Levitt (1976-82)...Ron Carey
Detective Baptista (1976-77)...June Gable
Detective Arthur Dietrich (1976-82)...Steve Landesberg
Lieutenant Scanlon (1978-82)...George Murdock
Network:
Release History:
Probably best know for that jazzy lone electric bass guitar from the theme song climbing up, then kicking into a groove as funky as it’s characters, this Emmy and Golden Globe Award winning situation comedy won the hearts of audiences in the seventies by expressing an irreverent, devil-may-care attitude to a nation thirsting for some good laughs and some truth in the wake of war in South East Asia and the Watergate scandal. Rather than focusing outward onto the streets, “Barney Miller” looked inside the station house at the misfit police and detectives of the 12th Precinct of Manhattan in the heart of Greenwich Village. Wojo, Barney, Fish and the rest were juxtaposed with the freaks, crazies, lost souls, and other near-do-well’s that found trouble with the law in a kind of contest of who was crazier. The shabby anonymity of the environment was it’s charm (we could have just as easily been in Cleveland or Seattle) and the colleagues at the desk next to them could just have easily been our own. This beloved gaggle of anti-heroes, flawed and phobic civil servants, freed us all up, at a time we really needed it, to laugh at the absurdity of it all.
Barney Miller, the Captain, always respected by his men when it came down to it moved from shocked amazement to complete exasperation while he did his best to wrangle, manage, motivate, and otherwise resuscitate his staff of cops including, the lightning fast spanglish speaking Chano Amenguale, the lightning brew coffee making Nick Yemana, the forever phobic Stanley “Wojo” Wojohowicz, and the cosmopolitan Ron Harris, who though ambitious, seemed also a touch the bon vivant thus giving us the impression that parts of his life would remain forever a mystery. The legendary Abe Vigoda played Fish (never block his access to the bathroom), forever slogging through the rain; he was a hopeless man who put one foot in front of the other, marching eternally onward into the bleakness, though already defeated. Not surprisingly, this cheery, uplifting, and refreshingly authentic character spawned a spin-off, Fish (one year run), in 1977. Lastly, the forgettable Officer Levitt, God bless him, was such a meek loser he gets only the following mention: when it really does finally get too much for him…watch out!
In the age before car seats, bicycle helmets and smoking laws, racism, perversion, and general human frailty were topics dealt with, not through the overt and programmed posturing we often see today, but instead loosely and with a sense of joy and a freer hand. It was the morally ambiguous areas, Wojo feeling the nagging sting of constant anti-Polish jokes, or officers comically pushing to suppress their natural manly urges amongst lusty, short skirted ladies of the night, or werewolf mind readers (well maybe not that one) that kept our interest. Barney was a good man forever trying to keep it together amidst the bumbling, madness, and absurdity that surrounded him; and it was funny as hell when he failed. And sure his officers used pencils for chopsticks, avoided their jobs while gambling, and once “accidentally” dipped into the special brownies locked away in evidence from a drug bust. In the end, we knew that they were coming through for us, that they too had good hearts (for people from the seventies), and that we would be safe in their warm if not always capable hands.
Flipping over the turtle and exposing the dark underbelly of gritty urban life in the seventies to bright shiny sitcom lighting illuminated a lot of laughs over a police show less about the danger of police work and more about the drudgery of processing dastardly deeds. These eccentrics, cops and criminals alike, contaminated by the hard knocks of life, stumbled through, surviving along with us as we laughed together. When the ratings bell finally rang for the show in 1980(?), signaling the end, the writers characteristically figured out a way to live on forever: An antique gun was discovered believed to have been 1890s New York Police Board Member Teddy Roosevelt’s thus cementing both the precinct building firmly onto the historic register and Captain Barney Miller as… well… the guy who had occupied Teddy Roosevelt’s office a century later. This show above all characterized heart: a simple look at characters a lot like us. At the death of Nick Yemana, Jack Soo’s character in 1979, the coffee cups he had filled so many times with rotgut were lifted on camera in tribute to him one last time. That was Barney Miller.
