by M.G. Wood

LOST on a small island, living where time and space are suspended, a small group of distinctly different people hailing from all walks of life co-exist while strange characters pass in and out of a limited view. Moving forward and backwards, shifting perspectives, we're in and we're out of the money. The shiny glass reflects a mirror image.

In 2009 our ancient analog televisions will be replaced by the high-faluttin' high-definition TVs of the future. Just as the Satellite replaced the rabbit ears and the roof-top antennas of yore, we are moving into a space-age of technological advances that will require little or no sacrifice on our parts.

But, just when it looked as though the high-def, low concept psycho-dramas and "Reality Shows" had replaced the bygone Golden Years of television, we are rescued by a piece of the very technology that threatened us, namely DVD.

In the 1970's Television took a dramatic leap forward with shows like All in the Family, Maude, The Bob Newhart Show, and Barney Miller, breaking social and political ground with cutting edge writing, forever altering the look of American Culture with unheard of casting of minorities in major roles within all genre of television.

The Seventies:

Guns, Race, The Equal Rights Amendment, Recession, Crime, Garbage, The Oil Crisis; all rich fodder for purging a nation of it's long rancid familial dysfunction.

Barney Miller ran from January 23, 1975 to May 20, 1982 on ABC. In a perfectly poetic fashion, Barney Miller didn't suffer poor ratings until it entered its final two seasons in 1980 and 1981, after Ronald Reagan led the country into a whole different direction socially and culturally; the 1980 & 1981 seasons did not break the top 30.

From Wikipedia:

Captain Miller tries to remain sane while running a police station manned by pessimistic nearing-retirement Philip K. Fish, naive Polish-American Stanley "Wojo" Wojciehowicz, suave African-American Ronald Nathan Harris, philosophical Japanese-American Nick Yemana (who makes awful coffee every day),

diminutive (and obsequious) detective-wannabe Officer Carl Levitt and old-school, rambling superior Chief Inspector Franklin Luger. Neurotic Puerto Rican Detective Chano Amanguale was replaced by intellectual Arthur P. Dietrich from the third season on.

According to Wikipedia, the distinctive opening notes of the theme song's bass line, performed by Jim Hughart, are played over a shot of the New York skyline (with a garbage barge being towed in the foreground)

As the show progressed (and especially by the final seasons), the program became unusual for its increasing resemblance to a stage play, in that its scenes almost never strayed from the single set of the precinct station's squad room (with its prominent open-barred holding cell) and Miller's adjoining office. Almost all of the action and dialog took place on this single set. Characters came and went, but they were virtually never shown outside or in other buildings. Moreover, each episode in the later seasons usually took place within the course of a single workday.

Thus, Barney Miller tended to obey two of the three Classical unities of drama, unity of place and unity of time. The third unity, unity of action, was not followed, since each episode had multiple subplots.