That's right. I'm watching a 40 year-old TV series. "Rewatching" is a better term. Loved the series when it was on originally. After purchasing the DVD set I launched in and found, as I often have with these old beloved shows, that I am a little surprised. Yes, it's dated, but not in the way I expected. I was struck by the constant presence of air pollution in NYC, and how the river was always brown. I had forgotten, amidst the cries about climate change, that it used to be worse. A lot worse. There are also the faults of '80s television. The underscoring is bad, really bad, and with occasional hackneyed scripts the whole thing takes on the tone of melodrama now and then. But all that being said, a few episodes in, I was hooked. Again. Like "Barney Miller" this isn't flashy police work. It's paperwork and boring stakeouts and sitting in an office making phone calls. Which means it feels more substantive. This is compounded by storylines which are messy and events which aren't brought to a nice little conclusion at the end of each episode. The characters are messy too. They are complex and don't know what they want or need and are often at loose ends. And the acting. Oh, the acting. The whole cast is great, of course, but the delivery by Tyne Daly and Sharon Gless had me watching the show. Really watching. This was real feminism and remains, in this age, hugely impactful and unique. There is literally nothing on TV today like this. These two characters navigate the difficult landscape of the times. And many of the battles they fought are still present today. The difference in the decades isn't the walls they faced, but the attitude of those around them regarding those walls. In a gut-wrenching episode where Cagney is sexual harrassed by a superior her own partner questions whether Cagney sent mixed messages to the man. They fight, of course. That's another thing -- these women don't always get along. From different worlds and with different perspectives, they clash. A lot. And in doing so we learn that the "liberated woman" of the 1980s didn't just have to forge a path, she often had to struggle with the perceptions of other women, even her own perceptions of herself, to move forward. And sometimes she failed. This is what draws me in. This series is so much more ... real ... than most of today's offerings. These characters are more layered than almost any show I've ever seen with two women as leads. They are a human kaleidoscope of behavior. I dare anyone watching the show to dismiss these two women as being in any kind of a box. You can't sum up their "type" neatly, and that's the point. These characters weren't two dimensional archetypes. They were complex and layered. The characters navigated their lives as best as they could and often fell short. And they weren't, and aren't, size zero. The characters didn't wear inappropriate body-hugging clothing at work like every female detective on television today does. The actors playing Cagney and Lacey had pedigrees, they knew the craft. Brava, ladies. You had the heavy responsibility of speaking for all of us. You did it with amazing gravitas. (PS, the "Complete DVD series" is anything but. The promo film and first season, sans Sharon Gless, were listed as "the last episodes," when, in fact, they were the beginning. I had to buy the four TV movies, complete with excellent inteviews, separately.)
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