Sarah Drew, who is leaving Grey's Anatomy after this season, has an exciting new job on dek: She'll be starring in the pilot of the announced Cagney & Lacey reboot, as per The Hollywood Reporter. She will star as Cagney, one-half of a Los Angeles police duo. Michelle Hurd, whom you might recognize from Law & Order: SVU, will play Lacey, the other half of the iconic coupling.
The original Cagney & Lacey, which aired from 1982-1988 starred Tyne Daly and Sharon Gless. The detectives were NYC-based, not L.A. based like the reboot's pair will be.
Though it was eventually popular, the show faltered at the beginning because it was a female-led show. According to a 1984 New York Times write-up of the show, the show lost its original lead when she was declared not "feminine" enough by "audience researchers." After that happened — losing a lead is a heavy blow — the show was canceled. Producer Barney Rozenzweig mounted a letter-writing campaign to save the show. For the gen z'ers in the back: A letter campaign is like a social media campaign, only fans are writing actual letters and sending them to publications. As described in the book Defining Women: Television and the Case of Cagney and Lacey, the campaign focused on the uniqueness of the two main characters.
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"It's the only show on television I feel I can relate to," one viewer wrote. "While I'm not a police detective, I do work in a high-pressure, fast-paced, male-oriented field. I am a twenty-six year old single woman, and a broker for a major Wall Street firm...I think it's extremely important that Cagney and Lacey be given every fair chance to succeed."
This situation isn't unfamiliar. In 2017, Amazon canceled Good Girls Revolt, a show about women battling sexism in the 1960s. Following the departure of Amazon executive Roy Price, viewers launched a Twitter campaign to get the show a second season. Sadly, Good Girls Revolt didn't fare as well: There's no incoming second season. Perhaps we should start writing letters?
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