Detectives Christine Cagney and Mary Beth Lacey are back this week after a six-year hiatus during which Lacey retired from her New York Police Department career and Cagney rose through the ranks and married a lawyer.
The women who portray the buddy cops, Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly, also went on to other things.
Gless, who married Cagney & Lacey producer Barney Rosenzweig in 1991, had her own 1990 series, The Trials of Rosie O’Neill, and did television movies and two stage plays, with a third coming up in January in Miami.
Daly won the 1990 Tony Award for her leading role in the recent 30th-anniversary stage version of Gypsy, made some television movies, turned up for a guest appearance in her brother Tim’s NBC series, Wings, and began a role as Miss Alice Henderson on Rosenzweig’s Christy, a CBS series that returns later this season.
But always there was the 1982-88 CBS series that made stars of them both. Would it ever make a comeback? It has.
In Cagney & Lacey: The Return (Sunday night on CBS), Christine, who fought her own alcoholism, has married James Burton (James Naughton), a Harvard-trained lawyer she met through Alcoholics Anonymous. Her nameplate now reads: Lt. C. Cagney-Burton.
Mary Beth, who retired after 20 years with the NYPD, went back to her Earth-mother persona to become a housewife and mom to little Alice, the only child remaining now that both sons have left the nest.
But time inevitably has taken its toll: both women have picked up some midlife pounds. So writers Terry Louise Fisher and Steve Brown built middle-age spread right into the script, along with Christine’s menopausal hot flashes and Mary Beth’s decision to dye away the gray.
“Hitting 50 is an interesting thing,” said Daly, 47. “It’s called, ‘Mourning the loss of grandiose dreams.’ At 25, you have expectations, and you alter those accordingly and try to have a second act.”
The movie begins with a reunion at Christine’s house for all the old hands from the 14th Precinct, including Detectives Manny Isposito (Robert Hegyes), Victor Isbecki (Martin Kove), Verna Dee Jordan (Merry Clayton), Al Corassa (Paul Mantee) and Marcus Petrie (Carl Lumbley). Vonetta McGee returns as Claudia Petrie and Al Waxman as Lt. Bert Samuels.
Mary Beth arrives with her husband, Harvey (John Karlen), who in the midst of the festivities is felled by a heart attack. She now must consider Cagney’s suggestion that Lacey return as a detective, working on a contract basis.
Meanwhile, Cagney has reason to become concerned about her marriage when her husband gets a nighttime call from “Bill” asking him to come to Washington to talk about a government appointment.
In a short scene, with the Capitol as backdrop, Jim and Christine talk before she heads back to New York. It is clear that their two-career relationship could be threatened.
A second Carney & Lacey movie, subtitled Bad Habits, airs later this season and will follow these threads.
Gless, 51, who like Cagney did not marry until late, also put her career first. But when she married Rosenzweig, she became stepmother to his grown daughters. One, Torrie, is listed as a producer for this Cagney & Lacey movie.
Daly’s 25-year marriage to actor Georg Stanford Brown broke up in 1990, leaving her a single mother with three daughters. One, Kathryne, now 23, has a brief role in this movie playing a technician inside a van that is recording an encounter between Lacey and a suspect.
Kathryne Brown also has a small role in Christy, Daly said. Daly’s other children are Alisabeth, 26, mother of Daly’s granddaughter, and Alexandra, 9.
Because of Alex, she is careful about the amount of time she is away from home. That’s why she agreed to do Cagney & Lacey again as movies but not a series.
