Barbara Corday takes women’s working friendships seriously enough to build a police drama around one. Cagney & Lacey rewards that attention, though its cases are often less persuasive than the company of its leads.
Fi1m perspective
The women in Cagney & Lacey (1982) have demanding jobs and less recognition than their effort deserves. Getting to know them is the attraction, even when another familiar investigation gets in the way. Barbara Corday and co-creator Barbara Avedon give that working friendship enough importance to sustain a police drama, and we rate the programme for taking it seriously. It is good company, with a clear limitation: the relationship remains more interesting than much of the police work.
The partnership began in 1972, with episode writing that included Wonder Woman (1975); development of Cagney & Lacey started in 1974. It reached television as a film in 1981 before becoming a series. Corday and Avedon drew on their own working relationship in shaping the friendship, putting something they knew into a familiar kind of programme. Corday’s recurring concerns are practical ones: career and family, sexual harassment, and women working in male-dominated professions.
The casting makes that decision work. We warmed to Cagney & Lacey because Tyne Daly and Sharon Gless make the women persuasive company, and their friendship worth following when the cases disappoint. Avedon and Corday deserve credit for giving the relationship that much space, but the performers have to make us want to spend time there. The presentation can be plain, and neither the leads nor the premise can make every investigation interesting; our recommendation depends on an appetite for the people doing the work.
From 1979, Corday’s career shifted towards executive work at ABC, followed by Columbia Pictures Television and CBS. She also created American Dream (1981) during her ABC period, so she had not stopped creating programmes. That change makes a simple list of writing credits an incomplete account of her work, though an executive title tells us little about what is good on screen. Start with Cagney & Lacey, and give the friendship more patience than the cases sometimes earn.
Biography
Barbara Corday is an American television writer, producer and executive. Born in Brooklyn, New York, she began her career in publicity before meeting writer Barbara Avedon in 1972 and forming a writing partnership. From 1972 to 1979 they wrote episodes for series including Fish, Wonder Woman and Maude.
In 1974 Corday and Avedon developed the idea for Cagney & Lacey, which CBS broadcast as a television film in 1981 before commissioning the series that ran from 1982 to 1988. Corday later held executive positions including vice president for comedy series development at ABC (1979–82), president of Columbia Pictures Television (1984–87) and executive vice president of prime-time programming at CBS Entertainment (1988–90). She has also produced series such as Knots Landing and taught at the University of Southern California.
