Barbara Avedon wrote women whose working relationships deserved sustained attention. Cagney & Lacey is our reason to value her: a persuasive female partnership in a police drama whose cases do not always match its characters.
Fi1m perspective
In Cagney & Lacey (1982), two women go to work, and their friendship matters as much as the investigation. Barbara Avedon's strongest claim on our attention is there: she helped make their relationship a reason to return to a police drama. Created with Barbara Corday, the series is worth revisiting, with some patience for the familiar cases. We warmed to Tyne Daly and Sharon Gless's performances because they make the women persuasive company even when the police work is routine.
Avedon came to that partnership through episodic television, including sitcom work on Bewitched (1964). She and Corday began writing together in the early 1970s, working on programmes including Maude and Medical Centre. They developed Cagney & Lacey as a feature-film idea in 1974; it took eight years to reach television as a series. The significant turn is from contributing individual episodes to helping create a programme with a female partnership at its centre. That gave her interest in women at work room to develop beyond a single assignment.
We should be careful about how much credit we give one writer. Daly and Gless do much of the work that makes the series worth returning to; Avedon shares the creating credit with Corday, and Barney Rosenzweig was its producer. The writing gives us working lives that demand more effort than the recognition they receive would suggest, which is a sound basis for caring about the detectives between investigations. The presentation remains plain, and the procedural business can feel dutiful. We would not recommend it chiefly for the crimes.
Her credits also include a story contribution to Wonder Woman (1975) and the television film This Girl for Hire (1983), which she wrote. Both keep women at the centre, though those credits tell us where her interests lay rather than how well every script worked. Start with Cagney & Lacey, provided a routine case is not enough to put you off good company.
Biography
Barbara Avedon was an American television writer. Born in New York City on 29 June 1930, she died in Palm Springs, California, on 31 August 1994. She began her career writing episodes for sitcoms including The Donna Reed Show, Father Knows Best and Bewitched.
With Barbara Corday she created the series Cagney & Lacey, which premiered in 1982 and was the first American dramatic television series to star two women as police detectives. She also wrote for Fish, Executive Suite and other series, and contributed to the 1983 television film This Girl for Hire.
Avedon co-founded the anti-war organisation Another Mother for Peace during the Vietnam War era.
