Cagney & Lacey television series

Cagney & Lacey is an American television series that originally aired on the CBS television network for seven seasons from March 25, 1982 to May 16, 1988. A police procedural, the show starred Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly as New York City police detectives who led very different lives: Christine Cagney (Gless) was a career-minded single woman, while Mary Beth Lacey (Daly) was a married working mother.

The series was set in a fictionalized version of Manhattan's 14th Precinct (known as "Midtown South"). For six consecutive years, one of the two lead actresses won the Emmy for Best Lead Actress in a Drama (four wins for Daly, two for Gless), a winning streak matched only once since in any major category by a show. Producer Barney Rosenzweig was influenced by the feminist movement through his then-girlfriend Barbara Corday, who recommended to him Molly Haskell's book From Reverence to Rape.

After learning through Haskell that there had never been a female buddy film, Rosenzweig sought to make one, a comedy initially titled Newman & Redford (before changing the title for legal reasons). Corday & Barbara Avedon wrote the script. No studio wanted to make the film, so Corday considered taking it to television.

Rosenzweig took the script, removed the main plot (leaving only the character development), and took it to all networks, but only CBS picked it up. Actress Loretta Swit played the role of Christine Cagney in the original television movie (October 1981), but she was forced to decline the role in the series when the producers of M*A*S*H refused to let her out of her contract.

The movie was then picked up as a series, first airing with six episodes as a midseason replacement in the spring of 1982, with Meg Foster playing the role of Cagney. The show was then picked up for a regular season beginning with the 1982–83 season, but Foster was then replaced by Sharon Gless because CBS deemed Foster too aggressive and too likely to be perceived as a lesbian by the viewers.

CBS executives hoped Gless would portray Cagney as more conventionally "feminine" and attempted to pressure the producers to remake Christine into a more "high-class", snobbish woman from wealthy parents. Barney Rosenzweig and Barbara Corday initially refused to change Christine Cagney from a tough, witty, working-class woman.

Shortly into Gless's tenure on the program, Rosenzweig and Corday compromised with the network brass. They further developed Cagney's background, explaining gradually in a loose storyline that she may have been born to a somewhat well-to-do professional mother, who had a relationship with police officer Charles Cagney who came from working-class roots. Charles and Maureen soon separated after Christine and her brother Brian were born.

She was partially raised in an uptown Westchester world, which she appreciated; however, the trappings of the upper-middle social strata sometimes drove her to miss her father's lifestyle, and she and her father therefore established a special bond. Cagney was a bit quieter and more reserved than her vivacious, talkative, loud partner Mary Beth Lacey, but could still relate to the world with attitudes that could be shared by people across the social spectrum.