Barney Miller

This is the most impressive of the sitcoms ever done about law enforcement. It is understated, intellectual, comical, & entertaining while dealing with the beat of a group of New York City Dectectives. The show draws its characters well, & defines & redefines them throughout the show.

This show was a slow starter in the ratings, partly because of it's subtle humor, & partly because early on it would get distracted away from the police station with Barney's wife (played by Barbara Barrie). After the first couple of seasons, the show started concentrating more on it's knitting, the police station, & graduated into a more sophisticated comedy.

The recent death of the late Ron Carey reminded me of just how well he played Officier Carl Levitt. His character always behaved like all the Detectives looked down on him, an underling. Carey played that attitude brilliantly.

Hal Linden was always a consummate Captain Miller, always being put on the spot by his team & shooting from the hip at times. Steve Landesburg (Dietrich)was the most intellectual of the detectives always taking a simple conversation & making it complex.

James Gregory as Inspector Luger was alway bugging Barney with stories of the old days he'd have to listen to from a superior. In some ways this was the veteran movie actors best role. Max Gail as Wojo was always being played as stupid but often got the last word in.

Abe Vigoda was perfect as Fish, so good they spun him off from here to his own series. Jack Soo was brilliant as Yemana but sadly death cut his role short in this series, similar to Coach on CHEERS. Ron Glass as Detective Harris was very good as another mainstay on the show. This show had a diverse cast, even Linda Lavin who would go on to play ALICE got a good start on this show.

The writers were brilliant in that they constantly kept developing the characters to the point that when the last show came along, they ended the show with a script where everybody finally got what they wanted in promotions for years, and ended with Barney closing the door on the squad room for the last time.

As this show hits the DVD's, I bet it gets a slow start but once young folks get exposed to it, the sales will pick up speed. The shows are that good.

This show was one of the funniest in the history of television. The various characters that came in and out of the station made this show what it was. I really think the show was at its peak during the period when Abe Vigoda, Jack Soo and Steve Landesberg were all on the show together. However, once Vigoda and Soo were gone, the show seemed to shift to a more dramatic direction. This was especially evident in the memorial episode for Jack Soo. However, this was a highly influential show and if you look at Night Court, which was produced by pretty much the same team as this one, you will see some of the same qualities on that show that made this one great.

I am a fairly young person and I was very pleased to find such a wonderful show on DVD. The title of the show through me off, but after reading a bit about the show I was intrigued and bought it.

At first the show mainly focuses on the situations and what the cops are doing, but after a while the show starts to focus only on the squad-room where the detectives convene.

Barney Miller is always getting into other peoples business. When a criminal comes in he Interrogates them and tries to get the whole story out of them and also tries to put his own opinion or label on it.

Most of the stories are very light-hearted, but some do hit close to home. The show is funny, comical, and well played, but some episodes do have a serious vibe at the end of them.

By season three the cast is permanent and the show gets its real humor on. Each detective has an impressive amount of character depth. It was interesting to learn about each of them as I watched all of the episodes. By the end, I felt as if I knew each of them personally.

The only parts of the show I didn't like was Lt. Scanlon. His character was played so well, I truly didn't like him. Inspector Luger was played by a veteran actor, but his character seemed a little dim-witted. By the end of the series, the only set you would see is the squad room. After having visited a couple different stage sets (for example: Barnies apartment, Fish's apartment and the hide-out apartment) it seemed very confining to only use the squad room in the later seasons.

The exits of Fish and Yemada were torture on the show. Fish was great when it came to quick and ironic humor while nick tried to do the same, but his character was never truly replaced.

Overall, I love this show and I continue to watch it often. The humor, the stories, the backgrounds of the people are all interesting and entertaining. This show is recommended for all who love comedy and also recommended for all who wish to enjoy a simple show.

This show was one of the reasons why the ABC would dethrone the CBS, as the number one network in prime time in the latter 1970's.

Barney Miller depicted the day to day workings of a typical New York City detectives unit. Void of overly melodramatic urban drama, and the now all too over played "tough guy" act, Barney Miller was touted as being a fair portrayal of the life of a detective (with much more levity of-course).

Even though it was first and foremost a comedy series, the writers gave us a much needed balance by injecting a bit of drama into the plot and characters themselves. This dramatic element was so well done, that it added to character development, and provided for more laughter. Their witty dialog rarely left the viewer disappointed, or without a laugh, and with entertainment being the key factor of any Television production, the cast of Barney Miller delivered in episode after episode.

However, the show was produced during a time when crime in NY City was being managed with a overly diplomatic approach. An experiment that would prove it self to be disastrous, effectuated lectures by some of the shows characters, demonstrating an endorsement of this new more "liberal" approach to fighting crime.

There is not much out there today that even comes close to what we had in Barney Miller. It seems that todays Television lacks respect for their audience, as cheap sexual gags, and one liners dominate the sitcom landscape, and leave us with vacuous and cloddish jocularity.

Barney Miller will however, be an example of what Television once was. A time when mature, plot driven humor was demanded, and the crude and immature was rejected.

"Barney Miller" was a show that changed dramatically during the course of its run, despite the fact that its plot, setting, and basic cast remained the same.

The show dealt with a detective squad at a precinct house in New York City and the often strange people from the community who went in and out their door. At the beginning of the series, the pace was fast and the comedy a bit "loud," and the emphasis was on one-liners and quirkiness rather than on real characters. Barney was the captain of the precinct, very put-upon and overworked, but nevertheless always wise and friendly. Wojo was the well-meaning detective who was a bit lacking in smarts. Harris was funny, fashion-conscious, and cool, while Yemana was much more introverted, though he would also provide the occasional witty commentary. Fish was the old man on the verge of retirement who had more ailments than you could imagine. Chano was perhaps the most "normal" of the bunch after Barney, and always tried to have a positive outlook despite being constantly exposed to the less inspiring side of life.

The detectives were racially mixed, which, at the show's inception, would occasionally provide for some comedy, though ethnic humor was largely dispensed with after the first season. Other detectives came and went after an episode or two, especially during the very early years.

By the end of the run, the pace of the show had slowed down somewhat. The precinct house was now very leisurely for a police station in Manhattan. Conversations became more relaxed as well, and you got the idea that the directors were trying to show human interaction as it often was, with people thinking before they spoke. The dialog became wittier and the characterization much more subtle. Barney was now more of a real person, the pressures of life seemingly affecting him more, and he would even get a bit frustrated with his immediate underlings. Harris, with whom Barney now clashed from time to time, had become successful financially and was becoming more attuned to the cultural side of things. He had developed into something of a snob, and was also less and less interested in police work as the series went on. Chano had moved on early, Fish retired (and had briefly had his own show), and the actor who played Yemana died, inspiring a half-hour tribute to actor Jack Soo by the rest of the cast. Dietrich was Fish's replacement, and was the intellectual of the group (one Monday morning he chit-chatted about how he had gone to the Goethe Festival over the weekend). His (often in-depth) knowledge on every conceivable subject was an extreme nuisance to Harris, but proved helpful to Barney in official matters. Wojo, by the end of the run, was no longer the loud, sex-driven brute he had been before, but rather a soulful and sensitive person, prompting Harris, in one of the show's great inside jokes, to proclaim in the final episode: "He is so MUCH improved!"

Popping in occasionally was Inspector Luger, Barney's immediate superior, a man who yearned for the old days of police work, when men were men (and died like men) and there wasn't all this "concern" for the suspect. Though Luger never changed, Barney's reaction to him did: where he once considered him as an amusing relic from the past of the city's police force, he later saw him as dangerously out of touch and a potential threat to police-civilian relations. And he turned out to be just that: at a protest by Hasidic Jews at the station house, Luger suggested that they all disperse, go home and "take a shave." The protest immediately turned into a riot.

The obsequious Officer Carl Levitt became a regular after a few seasons, always trying to become a detective, but continually rejected, apparently because of his height. And every once in a while there was a visit from Lt. Scanlon of Internal Affairs, who delighted in the hunt and, especially, the smell of blood.

Almost all the action during the run of the show took place in the squad room (which contained a single jail cell) and Barney's adjoining office. Despite the fact that the squad seemed very small considering its location (not to mention not very busy!), the viewer got the feeling that he was really in a run-down precinct house. The office was cramped, and the furniture old and in dire need of replacement. Papers and files lay around for so long that you actually got used to them being where they were, and the advertisement for boxing posted on the wall next to the stairs seems never to have been updated in seven years.

"Barney Miller," during its run, became a literate, well-written show with interesting characters and story lines. In its later years it unfortunately suffered from "social-cause-of-the-week" syndrome, à la Lou Grant, but it also knew when it was taking itself just a little too seriously, and the episode would often allow a well-timed and witty remark by Dietrich to lighten the atmosphere a bit.

"Barney Miller" is highly recommended, especially in daily reruns, where you can see its steady development into a fine television series.