Barney Miller and the Files of the Ol’ One-Two

Barney Miller and the Files of the Ol’ One-Two

Behind the Scenes of the Classic Sitcom

Otto Bruno

Barney Miller and the Files of the Ol’ One-Two

© 2022 By Otto Bruno

All Rights Reserved.

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, stored, and/or copied electronically (except for academic use as a source), nor transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher and/or author.

Published in the United States of America by:

BearManor Media

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Orlando FL 32804

bearmanormedia.com

Printed in the United States.

All photos used with permission.

Typesetting and layout by DataSmith Solutions

Cover by DataSmith Solutions

ISBN — 978-1-62933-858-3

For my mom, Adeline Agnello Bruno, and my dad, Otto Bruno, for making it all possible,

For the four D’s of Four D Productions, Danny, Donna, David, and Dannel, for making it all necessary,

And for my wife, MaryBeth, for making it all worthwhile.

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Introduction: Why Barney Miller?

Dad

The Human Condition

Treated the Audience with Respect

Underrated, Under-Appreciated

The 1974/1975 Television Season

Television Antecedents

Danny Arnold, Showrunner

Ted Flicker

The Danny Arnold–Ted Flicker Partnership

Danny’s Side of the Story

How the Film Detective Story Inspired Danny Arnold

Danny as Auteur

Fiercely Independent

Danny’s Style

A Do-or-Die Work Ethic

The Evolution of Barney Miller’s Shooting Style and the Quad System

Danny at Home

Danny and the Actors

Danny and the Directors

The Players and Their Characters

Hal Linden | Captain Barney Miller

Max Gail | Detective 3rd Grade Stan Wojciehowicz

Abe Vigoda | Detective Sergeant Philip K. Fish

Ron Glass | Detective First Grade Ron Harris

Jack Soo | Detective Sergeant Nick Yemana

Gregory Sierra | Detective Sergeant Chano Amenguale

James Gregory | Inspector Frank D. Luger

Steve Landesberg | Detective Sergeant Arthur P. Dietrich

Ron Carey | Officer Carl Levitt

Barbara Barrie | Elizabeth Miller

Florence Stanley | Bernice Fish

Character Development

The Writers and the Writing Staff

Chris Hayward

Roland Kibbee

Tony Sheehan

Reinhold Weege

Tom Reeder

Frank Dungan

Jeff Stein

Barney Miller and the Female Sex

Barney Miller and Real-Life Police Officers

Of Its Time and Timeless

A Haven for Character Actors

The Cops

The Victims and the Cage Characters

The First Pilot: The Life and Times of Barney Miller

The Second Pilot: Ramon

Danny Arnold’s Guiding Principles

Illustrations

Episode Guide

First Season

Second Season (First Full Season)

Third Season

Fourth Season

Fifth Season

Sixth Season

Seventh Season

Eighth Season

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Partial List of Sources

About the Author

Foreword

Thanks for the memories, and for a lot I didn’t remember, and for a lot I never knew. You’re right, it took great writing and a terrific cast (ironically, not one acting Emmy in eight seasons) but mostly an imaginative and courageous producer. Every decision was artistically, not economically, based. We never walked away from a shoot saying, We’ll do better next week.

You plugged into the funny. As actors we plugged into the real, and let the funny happen. What is amazing is that after forty plus years, it’s still relevant and courageous!

It’s tragic that Max and I are the only ones left from the regular cast to share in these memories, but I think I can safely predict that forty plus years from now these episodes will be just as relevant and courageous as today, because humans will be just as human, and funny will still be funny.

All the best with the book!!

—Hal Linden

You are obviously a highly intelligent person with a great sense of humor! Over the years that has become my usual response when people expressed their love for Barney Miller, because it has turned out to be true. That conversation often started with the most common first question I would get, Hey! Where’s Barney?

I’ve lived longer since the show ended than I had before it began.

Yet here I am writing a foreword to a book, wonderfully researched and written by my now friend Otto Bruno, who was ten when we started on the air and started watching it with his dad. That’s another common refrain I’ve heard over those forty plus years, I watched it with my dad.

The media landscape has changed immeasurably since those three-network days and yet many younger people keep finding it somewhere and agree with the old timers that it still holds up. Some even call it a classic.

Otto’s straightforward sharing of what he has learned comes from a deep and genuine curiosity and appreciation for collaborative creativity whether it’s on the baseball diamond, the music bandstand, or the film and television studio. In this case, the pebble in the pond is Barney Miller but the waves that ripple out reflect the humanity that was the centerpiece of Danny Arnold’s creation and all of us who were lucky enough to contribute to this special show.

—Max Gail

Preface

I learned many valuable lessons while writing this book. One is just how tricky the human memory can be. Not everything that was told to me could be confirmed or backed up by visual evidence within the episodes of the program or by multiple sources. I know that everyone believes the things they remember. Unfortunately, not everything we remember is necessarily true in the most objective way.

The truth is I took on the daunting task of writing about a television show that premiered on the primetime airwaves almost half a century ago. When I began work on the book there were only three remaining weekly cast members who were still around and sadly one of them was already sick and would pass away before we had the chance to speak. The creator and producer of the program had been gone for over a quarter century. What is worse for a researcher/writer, the creator of the show was neither obsessive nor compulsive about keeping memos, records, or journals of his activities. He worked from his gut and while he was a perfectionist by all accounts, he was also a procrastinator, an independent, and a bit eccentric. He left me no paper trail except the scripts of the show.

The layout of how I would tackle the subject changed numerous times. My initial idea was to have a very minimal episode guide. Eventually, that changed so that the guide is now a major component of the book. I also talked to other fans to see what they wanted in a Barney Miller book. I have provided most of those things: cast biographies, interview excerpts, photos, personal opinions, and the episode guide.

Ultimately, the most important lesson learned over the course of four years was that the story of Barney Miller is the story of Danny Arnold, the show’s creator, producer, and show runner. Arnold gave his blood, sweat, and tears to this program for the first five seasons. He essentially put every other aspect of his life on hold to dedicate himself to producing the best show he could turn out every week. He had been in the business for over twenty years by the time he embarked on the odyssey of Barney Miller, and he’d had some very respectable successes with shows like The Real McCoys, Bewitched, That Girl, and My World and Welcome to It. However, on all of those shows he was essentially working for someone else. He was instrumental in My World but Mel Shavelson was the creator and Sheldon Leonard was the guy at the top of the chain of command. He had done a show called The Wackiest Ship in the Army in 1965–1966 but it lasted only a single season. Barney was, in his mind, his last big chance for immortality and so he put everything on the line and rolled the dice.

There are many with whom I have spoken who are totally convinced that Danny Arnold sacrificed his health for the success of this show. In fact, at the end of the fifth season he was forced by his doctors to step away from the program. He underwent heart bypass surgery and stayed away from the day-to-day operations for two years before returning to the helm in the show’s eighth, and final, season.

Each of the main characters was a part of Danny Arnold’s personality. Every script, particularly in those first five seasons, no matter who wrote it, had Danny Arnold’s stamp on it. He was open to all ideas, but every single idea was given the Danny Arnold treatment before it was used. The show boasted some of the best TV directors around, but Danny had a lot to say about the directing of every episode as well. Some described his style as tyrannical, others respected that he went with his gut and knew what he wanted, and just about everyone described him as a genius.

There’s one more thing I learned about Danny Arnold that you won’t find in any other sources and that is that Danny Arnold was a tremendous judge of character. I don’t mean comedic characters. I don’t even mean a terrific judge of talent, although he most certainly was of both. I’m talking about personal character and integrity. I was continually overjoyed to discover that just about every single person who worked for Danny Arnold was/is a mensch. For those not familiar, mensch is a Yiddish word that according to Leo Rosten in The New Joys of Yiddish means, 1. A human being, 2. An upright, honorable, decent person, 3. Someone of consequence, someone to admire and emulate. The people I interviewed who worked for and with Danny Arnold were to a person, sincere, forthright, charming, kind, generous, and totally down to earth. For a fan of the show for almost fifty years, this was the ultimate rebuttal to the warning, don’t meet your heroes.

Finally, I hope that in the end the contents of this book will reflect the labor of love its creation was for me and the love and devotion of its grateful fan base for all those who helped to make it a television classic.

Introduction: Why Barney Miller?

Over the past few years, as I told people I was writing a book on Barney Miller, the most common question I would get is, "Why Barney Miller? In fact, a couple of my interview subjects asked me why I was writing a book about a TV show that was almost fifty years old? Some others, the ones who can’t possibly see anything of interest or importance in a television show (you know who these people are) are more direct and shorten their question to the very frank, and slightly patronizing, Why?"

Soon after I started the research for this book, a friend asked me the question but as I gave him what was apparently a passionate but vague answer, this public relations/branding expert told me, "You need to really determine why this show. What made this show so special to you that you felt compelled to write about it?"

It seemed like a simple enough question, one that you would think I had thought about a great deal. In truth, I hadn’t examined the specific cause all that closely. Luckily, there was something about the conversation I had with my friend that day that made me really examine exactly "why Barney Miller?"

The reality is that I’d been telling people for years the reasons why, long before I ever even contemplated a book about the subject. I loved Barney Miller from the moment I first watched its premiere on ABC nearly fifty years ago. In fact, that very first viewing is one of my reasons as to "why Barney Miller?"

Dad

I loved my dad—certainly not an unusual or earth-shattering enough reason to write a book—but it does, in its own way, play into the story of why this book came to be. When I was a kid, my dad worked for himself and so he rarely pulled into the driveway before 6 or 6:30 p.m. Most of the other families had finished dinner by that time. Nevertheless, I don’t ever remember eating dinner without him. We’d wait for his return and then eat together as a family. Following dinner, my father would retire to the family room. He might read the paper for a little while but soon enough he’d turn on the TV to relax. Like so many fathers of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, my father liked westerns and detective shows such as Gunsmoke and Kojak but he also loved to laugh. In fact, he possessed a big, booming, very recognizable laugh.

My father had very little interest in sports, any sport. Years later, looking back on our brief time together, I realized that my interest in television and films came about because it was the one activity we could easily share and enjoy together. My dad took me to a few baseball games when I was a kid but there was never a doubt he was doing it solely for my enjoyment. However, when we went to the movies or sat down on the couch together to watch a TV show or an old movie, well, that was something we could both appreciate.

The first TV show he shared with me was The Flip Wilson Show. I remember him reading the paper one morning at breakfast and seeming quite happy that some person named Flip Wilson was getting his own show. When the time came (Thursday night, September 17, 1970, at 8:00 p.m., to be exact), I sat down and watched the new comedy/variety show with him. Soon I had a Flip Wilson/Geraldine talking doll and a t-shirt with What you see is what you get, inscribed on it. I loved the show as much as, if not even more than, my dad.

Then there was Barney Miller. I don’t remember this being appointment viewing like The Flip Wilson Show had been. Even so, I can clearly remember snuggling on the couch with my dad to watch this new show. He may have seen ads for it on TV before that, but I knew nothing about it. As always, the thing I remember most from that initial viewing was my dad’s laughter. When the show ended, we knew we had found another show to watch together. I tell most people that we (my dad and I) watched the first two seasons together but that’s not completely true. The last episode of Season Two ran on Thursday, March 18, 1976. My dad died earlier that afternoon at the age of fifty-one from lung cancer. I was twelve years old. He didn’t get to see the next six seasons, but I didn’t miss a single episode.

The Human Condition

Many years ago, I was channel surfing and accidentally came upon a talk show on the Arts & Entertainment network entitled Nightcap with Studs Terkel and Calvin Trillin. It caught my attention because on this night they were talking with Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner, and Mel Brooks. Being a fan and a student of classic comedy, I was thrilled to happen upon this monumental collection of comedic giants. Of all the fabulous insights and stories that I first heard on this program, the one that stuck in my mind was a story related by Sid Caesar about how, during Your Show of Shows’ (1950–1954) [more likely Caesar’s Hour (1954–1957)] peak of popularity, the legendary comedian received a call from Albert Einstein’s secretary saying that Dr. Einstein wanted to meet with Caesar. It took a while for Caesar to be convinced that someone wasn’t playing a joke on him, but he eventually realized it was no joke and he nervously made an appointment to meet with the great man. Unfortunately, Einstein died before the two men could ever meet. Soon after Einstein’s death, however, Caesar received a call from Robert Oppenheimer, who told Caesar that, Albert wanted to see you. He figured out the physical equation. He wanted to talk to you about the human equation.

That’s an amazing statement and revelation. First, for Albert Einstein to seek you out in order for you to teach him something is obviously a big deal. However, what most impressed me is the two-sided understanding of the power of comedy on and in a society, and the idea that the comedic mind, the court jesters of the world if you will, might have a special insight into the human equation. Historically, we look to those jesters as the few people brave enough to shout, The emperor has no clothes. In order to do that, the comedian, critic, satirist, etc. must have an understanding of the human condition. For me, and for Danny Arnold and his Barney Miller cast and crew, the basis of the humor and the heart of the 12th Precinct stems from an understanding of, and respect for, the human condition.

The fact that Danny Arnold stocked his 12th Precinct with such a diverse workforce is part of that acknowledgment. When most of us think of the New York City Police Department, particularly the film and television depictions of it from the 1950s through the 1970s, we think of primarily Irish and Italian cops. The Barney Miller squad had neither of those two groups represented in its weekly cast. There was an African American, a Latino, a Japanese American, a Polish American, and two Jewish cops when the series began. As the series played out, we met Irish and Italian cops, not to mention gay and female cops, but they were all just seen as part of the tapestry of the department and of the human race.

Prior to Barney Miller, The Andy Griffith Show (1960–1968) and Car 54, Where Are You? (1961–1963) were the two popular sitcoms that revolved around police work. In these shows, the comedy stemmed primarily from funny cops like Barney Fife or Gunther Tooty. In Barney Miller, the cops may have been idiosyncratic but that just made them more human. They were real flesh-and-blood characters, not caricatures. No matter what their quirks were, they were very capable police officers. Arnold told his actors, Imagine you had to ask the police for help. How would you want to be treated? He wanted them to keep that in mind as they gave life to their characters.

The portrayals of the criminals and victims were a slightly different story. The humor of Barney Miller stemmed from the endless parade of fears, prejudices, opinions, and plights of everyday people. Nevertheless, even the most eccentric and kookiest among those who entered the 12th Precinct had a story that, at its core, contained a kernel of truth, a touch of humanity.

Those who worked with Danny Arnold will tell you that he believed that the key to Barney Miller’s humor was the idea of paranoids with proof. In other words, a man or woman would come into the precinct with what initially seemed like a crazy story or complaint but when questioned could actually come up with a legitimate (or semi-legitimate) reason for their fear. If someone in the squad thought the person was nuts or lying, there was usually another member of the group who could relate to or understand that person and would listen and try to quell their fears. The humor came directly from the personalities of the officers and their human responses to the fear, anger, embarrassment, and jealousies of their constituency.

Throughout the eight seasons of the show, Barney is not only the straight man to a precinct full of loonies but he’s also a father, a confidant, a teacher, a disciplinarian, a mediator, and a philosopher. He was always there to ensure that humanity and respect were shown to victims and criminals alike.

Treated the Audience with Respect

Creators and writers of TV shows always hope for a hit but it’s only when they strike pay dirt with a successful idea that the real work begins. Then they have to figure out how to come up with fresh ideas from week to week and year to year. This is a far more difficult task than it seems. That’s how and why so many shows end up jumping the shark, or coming up with outrageous storylines that don’t do justice to the show’s history, truth, or characters. In fact, most critics agree that Barney Miller was one of the few TV shows that never jumped the shark.

There haven’t been too many shows that come to an end before they are canceled but it does happen. For example, Carl Reiner closed down The Dick Van Dyke Show after five seasons (158 episodes) because it was becoming too hard to come up with fresh ideas. Jackie Gleason pulled the plug on the filmed half-hour sitcom version of The Honeymooners (the classic thirty-nine episodes) after only one season claiming the same reason. Danny Arnold would do the same after 171 episodes by ending the show in 1982. It was never canceled. Arnold ended it.

Unfortunately, new storylines aren’t the only challenge for long-running sitcom successes. There is also the problem of maintaining strong, intelligent, and fully fleshed out characters throughout the run of the show without allowing featured characters to become caricatures. The longer a program stays on the air, the harder it becomes to maintain a character’s integrity. There are a number of excellent shows that remained on the air so long that some of their characters eventually changed from quirky, but recognizably human, characters into cartoonish buffoons.

It’s not easy to allow a comedic character to evolve over time without becoming too serious and thus changing into a dramatic character or going so far to the silly side that it becomes a caricature of its former self. Stan Wojciehowicz is an excellent example of a character that certainly evolved and grew over time but was still able to create comedic moments. The origin of the comedy may have changed over time, but the character could still produce laughs without insulting the audience’s intelligence. What made Barney Miller special is that it never talked down to its audience. The humor could be silly but it was always intelligent.

There were many great sitcoms that came out of the 1970s, shows like Mary Tyler Moore, The Bob Newhart Show, Sanford & Son, The Odd Couple, and others. Two of the most influential shows in all of television history began as sitcoms of the 1970s: All in the Family and M*A*S*H. These were all great shows but, in the case of All in the Family and M*A*S*H, I have a hard time putting them strictly into the category of comedy. Both of those shows were, without question, terrific shows and I do not dispute their greatness or their impact on our culture. However, they started as comedies and ended up as dramedies. In fact, I think the word dramedy may have even been invented to describe M*A*S*H. Depending on the episode, it was hard to tell whether one was watching a comedy or a drama.

Barney Miller was always the one show that could cover serious material while still remaining true to its comedy foundation. There’s an old Hollywood quote that says, If you want to send a message, call Western Union. I’m not saying film or television stories can’t have depth or intellect, they can and they should. It’s more a case of being true to the origin of the mission. If the mission is to make people laugh then that should be the priority. For Barney Miller, it didn’t matter whether the stories dealt with nuclear arms, arson, Agent Orange, political asylum, homosexuality, suicide, aging, impotence, homelessness, the American flag, or the American Indian, the comedy was always in sight. There could be very serious and dramatic moments in an episode, but you always knew the writers would deftly return the focus to the comedy. This was a practice first introduced on the television sitcom (as far as we know) by Danny Thomas, who encouraged the treacle cutter, meaning when there’s a serious or dramatic situation always make sure to follow it up with a joke or humorous observation to relieve the tension. Like any artistic pursuit, it was more successful in some shows than others but Barney Miller was among the best shows ever in terms of keeping the focus on what was funny at all times. In the long run, the humor keeps the audience interested so they can learn something new, something valuable that they might never have expected in a primetime sitcom.

Underrated, Under-Appreciated

Ultimately, the final and perhaps most important reason for this book is that I have never felt that Barney Miller received the critical attention, praise, and immortality that it so richly deserves. The show was nominated for thirty-two Primetime Emmy Awards and won exactly three. Produced by a small independent company, Danny Arnold’s Four D Productions, means it never had a big Hollywood corporation behind it to mount aggressive media campaigns to win the awards. Nevertheless, this was not just another good, or even great, show. This is one of the very best shows in the history of the medium. The lack of attention and respect it has received in the decades since its original primetime run has always seemed unjust to me. If nothing else, I wanted to write a book that would celebrate a great moment in TV history.

The 1974/1975 Television Season

The 1970s began with a renaissance of television comedy. In 1970 TV viewers were introduced to The Odd Couple, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The next few seasons would add classics like All in the Family, M*A*S*H*, Maude, The Bob Newhart Show, and Happy Days. By the mid-1970s, the variety shows and westerns of the 1950s and 1960s were giving way to even more situation comedies.

The 1974–1975 television season that saw the introduction of Barney Miller was dominated by a gentleman named Norman Lear. Five out of the top ten shows on television that season had Norman Lear’s imprint on them: All in the Family (#1), Sanford and Son (#2), The Jeffersons (#4), Good Times (#7), and Maude (#9). All of Lear’s shows reflected a social opinion or significance that proved to be fertile sources of comedy.

In early 1974, sometime between January and March, Danny Arnold and Ted Flicker produced a pilot entitled The Life and Times of Barney Miller. In its original incarnation it was intended to be a comedic look at both sides of a cop’s life: the mundane daily police procedures of the precinct as well as the home and family to which he returned every night. As comedic police procedurals go, The Life and Times of Barney Miller was a much more realistic look at police work than say The Andy Griffith Show or Car 54, Where Are You?, which aired in the decade prior to Barney Miller’s debut. However, there was nothing new on the home front, meaning the portion of The Life and Times of Barney Miller that pulled back the curtain to reveal life in the Miller household wasn’t much different from any of the other domestic comedies of the 1950s or 1960s. Hal Linden says he believes it was the network that was unimpressed with the domestic half of the show and wanted Danny Arnold to put his full focus on the action in the precinct. Arnold, having the comedic mind that he did, would have no doubt figured this out and perhaps recognized the problem at the start right along with the network. Whatever the case, there would be only one other visit to the Miller’s kitchen in the entire eight-season run of the show and that occurred in Season One’s fourth episode, Graft.

ABC eventually passed on that first pilot. However, as Danny Arnold recalled in a 1979 interview with Dennis Tardan, It just so happened that that year, the fall of 1974, the ABC schedule just sort of crumbled to pieces and, according to Arnold, that’s what gave Barney a life.

The show began with very low ratings. Luckily, there were ABC executives like Michael Eisner and Andy Segal who felt the show had something special and should be supported. Arnold told Tardan, I absolutely felt … that if I could just keep it alive long enough that it would be successful and that people would really grow to love these characters because they were so identifiable, there was so much of everybody in these characters. Ultimately, Arnold’s instincts would prove to be correct.

Television Antecedents

In the years preceding Barney Miller, there were dozens of cop shows but very few that dealt with crime and punishment in a humorous way. The most well-known is The Andy Griffith Show and that is justifiably considered a television classic. As much a small town, rural comedy as a police comedy, Andy Griffith’s hometown setting of Mayberry was a place where manning the school crosswalk and writing out a jaywalking ticket or two constituted a full day for the local sheriff’s office.

The department, such as it was, employed Sheriff Andrew Jackson Taylor, known to his friends as Andy, and his high-strung Deputy Sheriff Bernard P. Fife, known to one and all as Barney or Barn.

Andy and Barney were as different as night and day. Andy was a widower raising his young son with the housekeeping help of his Aunt Bea. Barney was a swinging bachelor, at least in his own mind. Andy was even-tempered, logical, and an overall calming presence in his community. Barney, well, Barney was not unlike Henny Penny, always ready to assume the sky was falling and spread the news to all who would listen. Andy was a responsible and safe gun owner, hunter, and marksman. Barney accidentally shot more bullets into floors and ceilings than he ever shot at a criminal. Andy ran the town and Barney? Well, Barney was a nut.

However, Barney was a proud nut. He was loyal to his town, his friends, and particularly to his superior officer and best friend, Andy Taylor. Barney was certainly no Sherlock Holmes, but he was honest, willing to work hard, and always had the best interests of his town at heart. There were even occasional instances where Barney was shown to have some real native intelligence.

In the end, most of the laughs were usually at the expense of Barney and some of the other characters in the small town. In the early seasons of The Andy Griffith Show, a good portion of the humor was the lack of criminal activity for the office to control. In that way, you couldn’t find a more different type of police comedy than a show set in the lower east side of Manhattan. However, in Andy on Trial (S. 2/Ep. 29), Barney sums up the philosophy of the Mayberry Sheriff’s Office when he testifies in an informal hearing, You gotta understand, this is a small town. The sheriff is more than just a sheriff, he’s a friend. You ask me if Andy runs a taut ship … well, no he don’t but that’s because of something he’s been trying to teach me ever since I started working for him and that is that when you’re a lawman and you’re dealing with people, you do a whole lot better if you go not so much by the book but by the heart. Take away the folksiness of the vernacular and it’s a pretty apt description of the 12th Precinct’s philosophy as well.

Both forces enjoyed a healthy supply of empathy and interest in their community. In both shows, the police were truly the people’s friend in the neighborhood. Both Andy Taylor and Barney Miller taught and provided an example of humanity and honesty when dealing with the public. They could have fun, especially with their underlings but the community, as crazy as it could sometimes be, was sacred.

The TV cop comedy that probably had less in common with Barney Miller, despite its setting, was Nat Hiken’s Car 54, Where Are You? Nat Hiken was, and remains, a respected early television writer/creator/producer of scripted comedy. However, as funny as Car 54, Where Are You? could be, it seems much more dated than the other two shows. The location was also New York City but the characters are more cartoonish. Fred Gwynne provides the majority of the humanity in the piece while Joe E. Ross is more of a buffoonish sitcom caricature. It still has its fans after six decades but in this writer’s opinion, it’s not nearly as funny as Hiken’s previous hit show, You’ll Never Get Rich, a.k.a. The Phil Silvers Show, a.k.a. Sgt. Bilko, which is one of the funniest sitcoms of all time.

To be fair, I haven’t seen every episode of Car 54 as I have with The Andy Griffith Show so I apologize if the reader feels there’s more meaning to the show than I can see.

Danny Arnold, Showrunner

He had the Marine in him. He loved to wear leather jackets and he had this big head of reddish-thick hair and a wonderful kind of clown face. He was built, big barrel chest and shoulders. He was very generous. He had a very expansive sense of life, and loved his kids and his wife, Donna. They were almost always there on our shooting nights.

—Max Gail

Danny said, The only reason to do this show is to do the best we can do. There was no network involvement, there was no studio involvement, Danny was an independent. We didn’t have a studio executive with a time clock saying, Gentlemen, gentlemen, we’re going into overtime. We didn’t have that. Danny said, As long as it takes to make this the best we can do, that’s how long we’re going to be.

—Hal Linden

"Barney Miller is Danny Arnold," meaning the show as a whole, not the character named Barney Miller. Arnold’s family, Hal Linden, Max Gail, and others who worked on the show all agreed that each of the main characters in the Barney Miller squad room represented a piece of Danny Arnold’s personality.

There are show biz professionals who seem to know from the moment of their first conscious thought that they want to be an entertainer while others stumble into it completely by accident. Arnold seems to have fallen somewhere between these two extremes.

Arnold Danny Rothman was born on January 23, 1925, in the South Bronx to immigrants from Romania. According to David Arnold, the eldest of Danny Arnold’s two sons, his grandmother was a nurse and his grandfather died when his father was a very young child. Being the only child of a young widow, David says his father felt the pressures and guilt of his Jewish family to essentially be the man of the house. Danny Arnold expressed to his wife and sons his feeling that his mother never really recovered from his father’s death.

This less-than-happy atmosphere at home led Arnold to attempt to join the armed forces as soon as the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December of 1941. He was only sixteen at the time and was unable to join. He could join at seventeen but only with a parental signature. Arnold remembered that the day he went to sign up there were long lines to join the Navy and the Army but the line for the Marine Corps was relatively short. As he was expected to be home for dinner by a certain time, he got into the shortest line. It no doubt took some convincing, but Arnold was eventually able to get his mother to sign the papers and, at seventeen years of age, he became a Marine.

David says his father was injured a few times during his service but the last time was serious enough to get him sent back to the States where he wound up in the San Diego Naval Hospital. (Both sons said he won medals for his war service but that it just wasn’t something he ever brought up in conversation.) Following his recuperation, Arnold and his service buddies would hitchhike from San Diego to Los Angeles and it was there that he first became exposed to Hollywood and the bustling movie studios of the era. Out of the service and in need of a job, Arnold landed a position as apprentice in the Sound Effects Department at Columbia Pictures.

In a 1987 interview with radio host Bob Claster, Arnold said, I was sweeping out cutting rooms … but I taught myself at night how to cut sound effects for film and that was a time, this was 1944, when the war was still on and many of the technicians were gone. Arnold taught himself how to use the moviolas and sound sync machines and because the studios were so short of qualified technicians, he quickly received opportunities to show his worth.

The Monster and the Ape (1945) was Arnold’s first assignment at sound editing a film. It was actually a B-movie serial, the kind that was very popular in the Saturday matinees of the period. Arnold remembered that, The villain in the piece was a robot who was a man in a cardboard robot suit. So, of course, to create the illusion that he was made out of metal, there were a lot of squeaks and bumps and grinds and bangs as he walked and I had to practically create the character out of sound so it was a fascinating experience. According to Tony Sheehan, Danny told him that he’d also done sound editing on some of the Three Stooges shorts of the 1940s.

Arnold would go on to sound edit some memorable A films as well such as Cover Girl (1944) and Tonight and Every Night (1945). Nevertheless, he told Claster, after two years of doing that [sound editing] I went back to being an actor. And then eventually got tired of sitting around waiting for an agent to call for a job, decided I would write. Writing proved to be successful. I had no intentions of ever being a writer.

Arnold told Claster, I went back to being an actor. However, the only acting that we can confirm Danny Arnold did prior to the late 1940s were small parts in the Catskill Mountain resorts as a child. Arnold’s mother would take jobs as a nurse in the mountains during the summer season. The mountain stock companies were always looking for kids to fill certain roles and his Uncle Leon, who was an actor, helped the young Arnold get cast in shows. Those small roles, along with his uncle’s experiences, whet his appetite for an acting career. However, despite his statement to Claster that he went back to acting, it does not appear he did any more acting until after his military service and his stint as a Hollywood sound editor.

The first acting credit that we know of was a minor role in a Warner Bros. war movie entitled Breakthrough (1950). The question then arises, what was he doing from roughly 1946 to 1950? According to Hal Linden, Danny was a failed stand-up comic. He played small clubs and bars around Youngstown, OH, and Pittsburgh, PA. It was during this time on the road that he met a young singer and M.C. named Jack Soo. The two became fast friends and many years later, Arnold would cast Soo in a small role in a sitcom called The Wackiest Ship in the Army (1965–1966).

However long Arnold may have worked in nightclubs, it does appear that his time in that pursuit was unheralded. At some point, realizing a performing career was not the calling for him, he began to write. He told Claster that the first story he sold was The Caddy, a 1953 Paramount picture with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. According to Arnold’s son David, Danny Arnold met Jerry Lewis sliding into second base during a softball game in a park across the street from 20th Century Fox. Lewis noticed Arnold when he slid into second base wearing blue suede shoes. From that chance meeting, he was cast in small roles in the Martin and Lewis pictures, Sailor Beware (1952) and Jumping Jacks (1952). At some point, they discovered he had writing talent because he began writing for their appearances on The Colgate Comedy Hour as well, where he worked with their chief writers, Norman Lear and Ed Simmons.

The Caddy seems to be the project that propelled Arnold’s writing career. In the 1987 interview, Arnold said that after his formative writing years working on comedy, I decided I wanted to become a serious writer and I would do something that was as far away from the frivolous kind of material that Dean and Jerry were doing so I wrote a heavy mood piece. The film he wrote was a western called Rebel in Town (1956) starring John Payne and Ruth Roman. He claimed that film sort of opened up the business for me. He wrote a few inconsequential films before finishing that portion of his career with a feature entitled The Lady Takes a Flyer (1957), with Lana Turner and Jeff Chandler.

From 1957 through to the end of his career in the 1990s, Arnold worked on only one more feature film, The War Between Men and Women (1972) starring Jack Lemmon, Barbara Harris, and Jason Robards. Besides that one crossover into film, the remainder of Arnold’s career was in the field of television. He wrote everything from comedy to drama to variety television but his strong suit was always comedy.

He worked on a number of variety programs including those for Rosemary Clooney, Dinah Shore, and Tennessee Ernie Ford. The biggest impact of that work came in the form of Donna Arnold, his wife of thirty-four years, whom he met while working on the Ford program. The future Mrs. Arnold was a dancer on Tennessee Ernie’s weekly variety show. They were together until Mr. Arnold’s death. He had previously been married to starlet Joanne Gilbert but the union lasted just over a year from 1955–1956. Gilbert was the daughter of composer Ray Gilbert, Academy Award-winning songwriter along with Allie Wrubel of the song, Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.

Following the variety shows, Arnold looked to writing more structured stories. He wrote a couple of episodes for the popular dramatic anthology series, The Millionaire. Irv Pincus, creator and producer of the hit series The Real McCoys, saw one of Arnold’s Millionaire programs and asked if he’d be interested in writing a script for The Real McCoys. Arnold wrote the script and was amazed when Pincus not only accepted it, but also asked Arnold if he would produce the fifth season of the show. Arnold remembered, "I produced The Real McCoys the fifth season it was on the air and directed my first show for them and that was it. From then on I started producing and writing and directing."

He was next hired to be the showrunner for the now classic TV sitcom, Bewitched, starring Elizabeth Montgomery, Dick York, and Agnes Moorehead. He also wrote three of the first season’s episodes. Once again, in the interview with Claster, Arnold seemed to misremember slightly when he recalled doing the one-season show The Wackiest Ship in the Army before working on the first season of Bewitched. Regardless, Bewitched’s first season ran from 1964–1965 while The Wackiest Ship in the Army was on the air from 1965–1966. The reason for the confusion seems to be explained in a 1965 article in Pageant by Joseph N. Bell that states, "Producer Danny Arnold appeared with a show called The Wackiest Ship in the Army that he wanted Screen Gems to take on. The studio liked the idea, but not for that season, so executive producer Ackerman hired Arnold for Bewitched."

Therefore, in a sense, Arnold was correct. His idea for The Wackiest Ship in the Army TV show apparently did come before he took on the duties with Bewitched but the show itself did not appear on the air until the following season. By that time, his work on Bewitched was done. William Asher was not only a producer and director on the Bewitched series but also the husband of the show’s star, Elizabeth Montgomery. Both Asher and Arnold had reputations for being very strong-willed and so it’s not surprising that they parted company after just one season.

The Wackiest Ship in the Army was originally a 1960 movie starring Jack Lemmon and Ricky Nelson but the TV version was created and orchestrated by Arnold. As he remembered it, The television concept was very different from the film. Arnold tailored the show for his friend, Jack Warden. He was also proud of the fact that he discovered a young actor for the series named Gary Collins. According to David Arnold, both men remained close friends of his dad’s up until the time of his death. The show was not your average television comedy in that it was an hour in length and did not include a laugh track, which was highly unusual for a 1960s sitcom.

Unfortunately, The Wackiest Ship in the Army only lasted one season. Arnold followed up his first original series with a pilot entitled, Somewhere in Italy … Company B! That pilot, never picked up as a series, can also be found listed in some sources as Operation Razzle-Dazzle.

Arnold’s next stop was with a show already in progress. He joined the team running That Girl in its second season. The sitcom, starring Marlo Thomas, is now hailed as a feminist precursor to The Mary Tyler Moore Show but like MTM, the writers and producers of That Girl made sure the product was funny before preachy. Creator and producer Bill Persky was friends with Danny Arnold. Persky remembers, "I went over to see him on my way home and he was sitting at his dining room table making model cars because he had nothing to do. We needed someone on That Girl and … he and Marlo got along so I brought him in as producer of That Girl, a show that I had created along with my partner [Sam Denoff]. Within three weeks he wouldn’t listen to us but at the same time he was delivering really great stuff." Arnold spent two seasons as producer on That Girl before moving on to his next original story idea.

For the 1969–1970 television season, Arnold, along with partners Mel Shavelson and Sheldon Leonard, wrote, produced, and directed My World and Welcome to It, starring William Windom. It was an innovative premise for that era mixing both live action and animation in a sitcom format. Based on the works of humorist James Thurber, the show was popular with critics but generated mediocre ratings. In fact, as Arnold told interviewer Claster, It won the Emmy the night it was canceled.

Not yet ready to give up on Thurber, Arnold and Mel Shavelson, the man who had originally secured the rights from Helen Thurber for her husband’s work, joined forces to create a feature film idea based not on Thurber’s work but on his life. The film, The War Between Men and Women (1972), tells the story of a cartoonist who is slowly going blind and the romantic relationship he is trying to cultivate at the same time. Arnold remembered that, It opened [at] Radio City Music Hall, it did very well, played for a while and then disappeared. It was too gentle, I think, for the audience at that time.

The early 1970s saw Hollywood turn to the anti-hero, the vigilante, the rogue cop cleaning up the inner cities, to draw the crowds into the theaters. The films of the era reflected a new level of graphic violence not previously seen on the big screen. The War Between Men and Women, despite its often biting and sardonic humor, was just too intimate a picture for the times. It was by no means a flop, but it was never going to be titillating enough to grab audiences in the same way The French Connection (1971), Dirty Harry (1971), or The Godfather (1972) could.

Following that brief return to feature films, Arnold immediately put all of his focus back into television development. He worked on possibly two pilots for ABC. The first was Ann in Blue, which was telecast on August 8, 1974, on a show called Just for Laughs, a short series made up of an assortment of unsold pilots. It was a story about female police officers trying to get more meaningful work assignments out of their stodgy captain. Some sources claim that the director was Theodore J. Flicker while the writers included Danny Arnold, Marshall Brickman, Norman Steinberg, and Alan Uger. However, Unsold Television Pilots 1955–1989 by Lee Goldberg, makes absolutely no mention of Flicker or Arnold in connection with this program. Writer Norman Steinberg says he does believe that Arnold worked on an early version of the script but he never met him or worked with him personally on it. Mary Elaine Monti, one of the actresses in the pilot, also had no recollection of meeting or working with Arnold on this project.

However, on August 22, 1974, two weeks after Ann in Blue was telecast, The Life and Times of Barney Miller pilot appeared on Just for Laughs. Some sources claim this pilot was directed by Theodore J. Flicker as well while the writing credits are assigned to both Arnold and Flicker. The pilot was initially turned down by the network but would resurface in January of 1975 as a project now entirely run and controlled by Danny Arnold with the shortened title of Barney Miller. Flicker was never present on the Barney Miller set again. Linden remembers him only from the first pilot while people like Max Gail and Tony Sheehan, who came on board after the initial pilot, never set eyes on Flicker. This did not, however, prevent Flicker from suing Danny Arnold over proceeds from the show. The lawsuit remains a mystery to people like Linden and Sheehan since, with the co-creator credit awarded Flicker, it seems obvious that the show’s success must have generated an impressive amount of revenue for Flicker without him having to lift a finger.

Barney Miller’s first season (a thirteen-episode run) began in January of 1975 but did not immediately generate big ratings even though the reviews were positive. In fact, the review for the first pilot of the then-entitled The Life and Times of Barney Miller was actually more effusive than many of the second pilot’s reviews stating, a good, broadly farcical script and excellent casting soon give the stamp of exceptional TV comedy. However, the reviews of both the August pilot and the remade pilot/series’ first episode in January 1975 both note the letdown that occurs when the show’s action shifts from the squad room to Barney’s home life. Thankfully, critics, network execs, and Danny Arnold were all in agreement over quickly shifting the focus solely to the activities that took place within the walls of the 12th Precinct.

Barney Miller enjoyed an eight-season run on ABC. The show endured the loss of actors Abe Vigoda, who left to star in his own spinoff series [Fish], and Jack Soo, who died during the show’s fifth season, by adding characters and expanding roles for actors like Steve Landesberg and Ron Carey. Heeding doctor’s orders, Arnold stepped away from the day-to-day duties of the show at the end of the fifth season for two years due to a heart ailment. He eventually had quadruple bypass surgery. Tony Sheehan ran the production for those two seasons before Arnold returned to the helm in the show’s final season of 1981–1982.

The show spent four of its eight seasons in the top twenty of the Nielsen ratings and was nominated for over thirty Emmy Awards. It was, without question, the most successful and personally satisfying project of Danny Arnold’s career. The spinoff (Fish) and similarly themed shows (A.E.S. Hudson Street) that sprang from Barney Miller never captured the energy or appeal of the mother show. Danny Arnold would try one more original program, Joe Bash, in 1986 but it was a very dark cop comedy that never really got off the ground and he pulled the plug on that project after just six episodes.

Arnold continued to go to the office and work on the development of potential shows but in his 1987 interview with radio personality Bob Claster, he seemed to know that his time had passed. There was no realistic way he could produce a show in the same manner as Barney Miller again. It would not only be financially prohibitive but the networks would never give the same level of independence to a content provider.

In August of 1995, Danny Arnold died at the age of seventy of heart failure. Donna Arnold died of cancer in 2020. Their sons, David and Dannel, live with their families in California.

Ted Flicker

Theodore J. Flicker was born in New Jersey in 1930. He studied for a couple of years at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London before returning to the states and joining the Compass Players in Chicago, the first improvisational theater group in the country. He liked the ideas being pursued by the group but not their execution and so he moved to St. Louis and formed his own branch of the Compass Players. With the help and input of Elaine May, Mike Nichols, and Del Close, he put together a set of formal rules for improvisational theater. The Chicago branch evolved into Second City under the direction of Paul Sills while Nichols and May headed to stardom in New York without Flicker.

Flicker married actress Barbara Joyce Perkins in the 1960s and the two hit the road to Hollywood. He co-wrote the screenplay for a film entitled The Troublemaker with Buck Henry in 1964. The film was a moderate success and led to more writing work including the Elvis Presley film, Spinout (1966).

In 1967, Flicker got the chance to direct his first feature from a screenplay he wrote entitled The President’s Analyst. The film starred James Coburn as a doctor hired to be the psychoanalyst for the President of the United States. Once the doctor realizes he knows too much about the most powerful man in the world, he panics and starts to run. Ultimately, the satirical comedy poked fun at the FBI, the CIA, and every other American sacred cow that was part of our national culture. News of the film, as well as the screenplay itself, reached J. Edgar Hoover, head of the real FBI, and he was not amused. The film opened to good reviews in December of 1967 but within a few weeks, the studio pulled it out of theaters. Hoover called the White House, the White House called Paramount, and Flicker received a call from his agent telling him his career was all but over.

That was only partially true. The studio system wouldn’t touch him for feature films but he had surprisingly little trouble securing work in television. The majority of his work in the 1970s would show up on the small screen in TV movies like The Last of the Good Guys (1978) and weekly shows such as Night Gallery, Mod Squad, and The Streets of San Francisco.

In the early 1970s, he and Danny Arnold were teamed up to produce a pilot for ABC set in a police precinct house. As previously stated, the true origin story of their partnership is filled with confusion. All we know for sure is that both men must have worked together on the very first pilot, The Life and Times of Barney Miller. After that pilot failed to get picked up, Danny Arnold bought out the other investors, went back to work trying to get a second chance with the network and told Flicker his services were no longer required. However, because Flicker’s name was on the original pilot as a creator along with Arnold, the Writer’s Guild rules stipulated that his name remain on the show after Danny Arnold convinced the network to give it another chance. Therefore, Flicker received residuals as a co-creator for the life of the program creating a lifelong animosity, and a lot of lawsuits, between him and Danny Arnold.

Flicker and his wife eventually took their money, left Hollywood, and moved to New Mexico where Flicker pursued a new career as a sculptor. He eventually built a four-acre sculpture garden on his property. His work was also displayed in art shows and galleries in New Mexico.

Ted Flicker endured numerous surgeries and a variety of health issues before dying in his home after a fall on the night of September 12, 2014.

The Danny Arnold–Ted Flicker Partnership

Of course, this was never a partnership in the purest form of the word. Research suggests these two gentlemen never worked together before or after the initial Barney Miller pilot. In fact, nearly a half-century after the fact, no one remains from Arnold’s family or the Barney Miller production staff and stars who can remember anything passing between Danny Arnold and Ted Flicker other than animosity.

In my first interview with Hal Linden, he remembered it as little more than a marriage of convenience. He thought it was Arnold and Flicker’s agents who had put them together. He seemed to recall that they both wanted to pitch a police comedy to the network and their agents essentially said, We’ll never sell two and you’re both our clients so why don’t you guys get together … and produce a great one? Later in my research, I spoke with writer Tom Reeder and writer/producer Tony Sheehan and they seemed to think it was the network that put the two men together. A 1981 book by Sally Bedell (now Sally Bedell Smith), Up the Tube: Prime-Time in The Silverman Years, claims that Arnold initially conceived of an idea for a show about a retirement-age Jewish patrolman in New York City four years prior to producing the first pilot. He brought his idea for a humanistic cop to NBC and they turned him down believing that no ethnic show, especially a Jewish one, could possibly be popular. According to Bedell Smith, Three years later a William Morris agent put Arnold in touch with another writer, Theodore Flicker, who was trying to develop a drama about a Jewish detective in the San Fernando Valley. They threw out Flicker’s drama as unworkable and concentrated on a new comedy about a group of oddball detectives working in an obscure precinct in New York, the sort of place Arnold had seen in his occasional tumbles into trouble as a kid. This version seems to confirm the theory from Hal Linden.

To the best of his recollection, Tony Sheehan remembers Danny Arnold telling him that "Flicker was there during the week of the pilot, which was directed by John