Cagney & Lacey

Tyne Daly (Christy) played Detective Mary Beth Lacey. Sharon Gless, (The trials of Rosie O"Neill) was Detective Christine Cagney. This was a show about two women who worked together and became good friends outside their job. Harvey Lacey,Tony LaTorre, was a nice and understanding husband.This show was really well done and we enjoyed watching it. It is always good to see women playing that type of role. There is one episode that stuck with me. It was about Hispanic illegal aliens in the United States living in horrible conditions, even in the attic of a building. They were chasing them and purposefully missed them, by saying: "there is nobody here." That was a nice episode where they showed a lot of compassion.

Tyne Daly and Sharon Gless did a great job with Cagney and Lacey in the 1980's. Not only did Cagney and Lacey have a great theme tune but it has great plots and dialogue throughout.

Like a lot of great cop shows, this series presented it's characters as real people with real emotions. Tyne Daly and Sharon Gless were aided by a brilliant supporting cast throughout.

The show wasn't just about police work. Both Cagney and Lacey had their fair share of personal problems outside their job ranging from alcoholism to conflicts of interest with their job. We got to seem them convey a whole range of emotions throughout but we still got to see them do some wonderful detective work. I actually think they were both convincing as detectives.

All in all, this was a great series, possibly the greatest buddy cop series of the 80's.

Cagney and Lacey was one of the best acted, best written, best conceived police shows in TV history. Ranking alongside Hill Street Blues and Morse in terms of its quality, I would suggest it is one of the finest television series ever made, greatly surpassing most TV made today. Tyne Daly and Sharon Gless kept this series going so beautifully, with never a dull moment, and never anything less than perfect performances. So instinctive, so moving, so engaging and so charming - the two are among the great television partnerships. The gritty, honest dynamic those two wonderful actors generated is a beautiful achievement. It is actors like this that make television occasionally magnificent. What a shame we don't have anything to compare these days to this.

Most from the 80's will throw out Hill Street Blues as the greatest but to me there were others that were equally good but just never got the recognition. This was one of those shows.

This show really hit hard with issues like drug addiction to killers to the gay issue and even teenage prostitution. It ran the gamut. And it was no white-washed make everything rosy by the end of the show typical of usual TV shows of the day.

From Dt. Cagney, the single can never find the right guy who happens to be beautiful and hard nosed to Dt. Lacey, who was a wife, mother and housewife...on the side. Both characters gelled together. Couldn't have been a better yin and yang type duo. Both were women but both were totally different in personality.

I think my biggest complaint about the show is that it got to "political" towards the end of its run. Too many shows where the topic was preachy. You know, where they'll deal with a topic where it's pretty clear what their agenda was. I don't care for those types of shows as I can make up my mind on issues without any help.

To me, this was a great cop show of the 80's. Don't be off-put by the show having 2 female leads. If you are, you'll miss out because this was a really good show in it's day.

This show was unique in that it was the first time that two basically average looking women played the leads in a TV show that was not about the fact that they were just average looking women. The show was also ground-breaking in that both detectives in the partnership were women - smart, capable women. Women had gradually been integrated into TV police forces over the 15 years prior to this series, but they were usually part of a crime-solving team such as on "Ironside". The balance in this show was not through the well-known old cop/young cop formula. Instead, both detectives were 30-something women. The contrast came in the form of their marital status and their personal situations. Lacey was married and a mother, and Cagney was single.

There was a pilot and six episodes during the 1981-1982 season starring an actress other than Sharon Gless as Detective Christine Cagney. In the 1982-1983 season the show settled into the dynamic that made it so popular and which most people remember.