Hudson Street: Cast Photo - Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries

Hudson Street aired from September 1995 until June 1996 on ABC.

A conservative cop and a liberal police reporter found themselves romantically attracted to one another in this gentle comedy, which was co-produced by star Tony Danza. Tony Canetti ( Tony Danza), a detective with the Hoboken, New Jersey police department, was recently divorced from his one-time high school sweetheart, Lucy ( Shareen Mitchell). They were still on good terms, and although he had custody of his adoring son Mickey ( Frankie J. Galasso), she visited often and still liked the lug. lol Reporter Melanie ( Lori Loughlin), an opinionated impulsive woman who was quite sure of herself, didn't think much of Tony when they first met, but his cheerful demeanor and snappy banter won her over and they were soon dating-his first date " since the Carter Administration." Winston ( Jeffrey Anderson-Gunter), was the cynical waiter at the restaurant where they met. Seen down at the station house were old timer Al ( Jerry Adler), rabid feminist Kirby ( Christine Dunford), and oddball Regelski( Tom Gallup).

A Review From Entertainment Weekly

TV Review
LOVE ME DUO
TONY DANZA AND LORI LOUGHLIN PAIR UP FOR 'STREET'
-- Credits
Genre: Comedy; With: Tony Danza and Lori Loughlin By Ken Tucker
The true value of TV stars is much on display in HUDSON STREET (ABC, Tuesdays, 8:30-9 p.m.). Here's a little wisp of a sitcom that starts off with a divorced cop going on a blind date with a reporter. Soon enough, sparks fly. Not much of interest in that, except the cop is played by Tony Danza and the reporter by Lori Loughlin. In Taxi and Who's the Boss?, Danza established his thoroughly likable persona -- not threateningly smart, a stand-up guy with a good sense of humor. On Full House, Loughlin managed to more than hold her own in a show filled with show-offy men and cute children.

What Danza and Loughlin bring to Hudson Street is effortless savvy -- you like their characters even if, in these early weeks, you don't know them very well. So far, the series is doing a good job extracting laughs from its Hoboken, N.J., police-station setting. The producers have also done something shrewd in turning what looked like a one-shot performance in the pilot -- Jeffrey Anderson-Gunter as a grumpy and very funny Rastafarian waiter -- into a recurring role as an undercover cop.

Even if this show weren't hammocked between Roseanne and Home Improvement, chances are that tons of people familiar with both Danza and Loughlin would tune in anyway. Hudson isn't witty, must-see TV, but it's certainly a cut above most new stuff this season. B+

Posted Oct 13, 1995

An Article from The Associated Press

'Taxi' to 'Hudson Street' - 13 Years in Sitcoms and Still Driving

By Bob Thomas

"Rehearsal!" calls the director, and Tony Danza begins his high-energy drill for a scene in his new sitcom, "Hudson Street."

He dances around the kitchen of his bachelor pad to the music of "That Old Black Magic." His 10-year-old TV son, Frankie J. Galasso, enters and they exchange some adult banter. There's a knock at the door. Danza opens it to find his ex-wife (Shareen Mitchell) with a sawhorse traffic barrier.

"You can never find a parking place in this town!" she exclaims.

Danza interrupts the rehearsal and assumes the ex-wife's role. He repeats her line with emphasis, then plops the sawhorse on the living room floor. "The more frustrated you are, the funnier it is," he instructs.

The actress nods in agreement, and the director indicates her approval. After all, Danza is the star of "Hudson Street," and it's a Katie Face Production, named for his daughter ("You should see how she beams when she sees that logo on the screen").

More significantly, Danza is a veteran of 13 years of sitcoms, and he knows full well how to milk a laugh.

The rehearsal continues smoothly, and then the action moves to another set. It's a New Jersey police station where Tony Canetti (Danza) works as a detective. So there's the story line: New Jersey cop, divorced, sometime father, new romance with a crusading reporter (Lori Loughlin).

You can see it on ABC starting Tuesday, Sept. 19, following "Roseanne."

The rehearsal suspended, Danza climbs up to the handful of watchers in the audience bleachers and explains why he's back in the sitcom world after five years on "Taxi" and eight years on "Who's the Boss?"

"I had a deal with ABC that's been in place since 'Who's the Boss?,"' he began. "It's a deal unlike any others: a 22-episode commitment. This is a twofold thing here: It's one thing to star in a show, it's another to produce it. We hired the writers, we cast it, the whole thing."

The Brooklyn-born actor admitted that his primary ambitions after "Who's the Boss?" were to make his name in movies and appear on Broadway. He came thatclose to landing a role in the new Robert De Niro-Al Pacino film, "Heat." At the last moment, he was dealt a turndown.

Danza attributes his urgency to explore new fields to the skiing accident he suffered 20 months ago.

"Everything that could go wrong went wrong," he recalled. "I got airborne, and all I know is what other people told me. It was like my body said, 'You don't want to see this.' I went into a tree at 25-30 miles an hour - backwards.

"Stopped me cold. Hooked my back. Dislocated my spine. Broke eight ribs, put one in my liver, one in my lung. Bruised my kidney. Broke my leg. Tore up my knee. It was like the mob got me."

Danza, who was a wrestler at the University of Dubuque and a Golden Gloves boxer, recovered swiftly enough to go skiing last Christmas.

After the "Heat" disappointment, he decided to activate his ABC deal.

"The genesis starts with the romantic comedy, wanting to do something that I'm pretty good at, I think," he said. "Tracy-Hepburn was our prototype."

Curiously, "Hudson Street" is taped on Stage 25 of Sony Studio, formerly MGM. On that same stage, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn filmed some of their great comedies.

The head of Katie Face Productions, Melissa Goldsmith, shopped for writers and found a gem: Randi Mayem Singer, whose first produced screenplay was the smash hit "Mrs. Doubtfire."

"She wrote a pilot, and Melissa and I shepherded her through the process," said Danza. "She was right on the money. This was a romantic comedy, which is what she writes.

"She'd never written a TV show, so there was some reluctance at the network.... For the exact reason that she hadn't done TV before and hadn't that mentality, the script was really terrific.

"My whole M.O. now is to live up to that pilot, because it was so strong."

He realizes that "Hudson Street," if it clicks, may entail another long run. That doesn't bother him. He speaks fondly of his first two series.

"'Taxi' was an incredible learning experience, my first entrance to fame and some fortune - though I was broke when it was over," he said.

"'Who's the Boss?' was a joy from beginning to end. The only thing that was painful was the end. But I felt it had run its course.

"If 'Hudson Street' goes six years, I'll be pleased. Then I'll go out and do my act. I'd still like to break into movies; I'd like to have one great movie under my belt."

An Article from People Magazine

* October 30, 1995
* Vol. 44
* No. 18

Still the Boss

By Tom Gliatto
After a Near-Fatal Fall and An Earthquake, Feisty Tony Danza Returns to TV with a New Hit Sitcom

TONY DANZA LOOKS EMBARRASSED—and, at the same time, slightly defiant. The onetime professional middleweight fighter, who has just returned to prime time in what looks likely to be his third hit series, ABC's Hudson Street, is frustrated about his reputation as a bully. In fact, he says, "what I have a problem with is discourteousness. I respond in kind."

Example: On the afternoon of Aug. 20, according to a police report, Danza was talking with a neighbor on the beach in front of his rustic Malibu home with daughters Katie, 8, and Emily Lyn, 2, when he spotted two freelance tabloid photographers videotaping them. After they drove away, an enraged Danza headed them off in his Cadillac and bumped the front of their car. Then he leaped out of his car, kicked in the passenger window and snatched away the camera.

Danza refuses to comment on the incident (no charges were filed against him), but his friend and former Taxi costar Marilu Henner says, "It's too bad he couldn't have pulverized them." Danza just lets that familiar disarming grin spread across his face. "I'm the nicest guy in the world," he says, sitting on the deck at home and looking out at the ocean. "Why should I be mad? Things are great."

No one would fight him on that one. Hudson Street, a romantic comedy in which Danza, 44, plays a Hoboken cop learning to love a newspaper reporter (Lori Loughlin of Full House), has earned good reviews and, partly because it's nestled between Roseanne and Home Improvement on Tuesdays, has become an instant Top 10 hit. Lately, Danza, who is also the show's executive producer, has been literally tap-dancing with pleasure on the set. "He's got the energy of an 18-year-old," says Loughlin.

That he's on his feet at all is indeed cause for rejoicing. After ending an eight-year run on ABC's Who's the Boss? in 1992, Danza faced a year of nearly nonstop trauma, beginning in June 1993, when his mother, Anne Iadanza, a bookkeeper, died of brain cancer at 67. For her last six months, Danza cared for her in the Malverne, N.Y., house where he grew up with his brother Matty, 41, who works in the restaurant business. (Their father, also named Matty, a garbage collector, died in 1983, of lung cancer.) Even now, Danza says, he catches himself absentmindedly dialing his mother's number, "and I still find myself crying."

On the morning of Dec. 28, 1993, Danza was musing sadly over having passed his first Christmas without her. He had spent the holiday at his mountain retreat in Deer Valley, Utah, with his wife of nine years, Tracy, now 36, their daughters and Marc, his 24-year-old son by his first marriage, to college sweetheart Rhonda Yeomen. At 9 a.m., when the hills were still shrouded in fog, he headed for the top of the mountain.

The meager snow covering the slopes was hard-packed and icy. Danza got only about 100 yards down Birds-eye, an intermediate trail he had skied hundreds of times, when he skidded out of control. "It wasn't like I panicked," he said. "I remember thinking, 'Okay, get your feet in front and stop yourself.' That's the last thing I remember." He fell, lost his skis and slammed backward into a tree. His injuries were massive: two broken vertebrae, crushed ribs, a collapsed lung and a bruised liver and kidney. His right leg was pulled out of the hip socket. "It was like having a car accident," says Danza, "without the car."

After being rescued by ski patrol within minutes and loaded onto a sleigh, Danza was relieved that he had some sensation in his ski boot. His first fear, he says, was paralysis. He was rushed by ambulance to Park City Medical Center and eventually transferred to the University of Utah Hospital in Salt Lake City, where a team of spinal specialists decided to operate as soon as he stopped bleeding internally. Tracy stayed close by for his three weeks in the hospital. "He didn't want me to leave," she says, "and I couldn't. We were both very scared."

In a 4-hour operation on New Year's Day, surgeons inserted three metal rods into Danza's lower back. Afterward he was in intensive care for two weeks and dropped 25 pounds from his 5'11", 165-lb. frame before embarking on what would become a grueling, yearlong physical-therapy regimen. "I tried to be the best patient ever," he says. "I really had trouble thinking about what my life would be like if I wasn't me anymore."

But before he could start rehab, he had to face another crisis. Still dependent on a walker, Danza left the hospital on Jan. 14, and he and Tracy returned to their home in Sherman Oaks, Calif. Three days later the Northridge earthquake hit. "The house exploded," says Danza, who was sleeping upstairs when the quake struck at 4:31 a.m. "The bed almost hit the ceiling. I just hung on to Tracy." His daughters' bedroom wall collapsed; the girls made it out with the help of a housekeeper. Danza followed downstairs with his walker. "He was pretty amazing," says Tracy.

The family relocated to a rental home, then moved permanently to their Malibu beach house. Danza's gym, located on the site of the demolished Sherman Oaks house, survived the quake, and he now trains there regularly. His rehab started with short walks—first around his Malibu living room, then down the street. He was so slow, he says, that "old ladies used to pass me." Today he can do 1,000 sit-ups without breaking a sweat.

And, yes, Danza can tell you what he learned from all this. "It's called the present," he says, "because it's a gift."

TOM GLIATTO
TOM CUNNEFF in Malibu

For more on Hudson Street go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_Street_%28TV_series%29

To read some articles on Hudson Street go to http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=I7QeAAAAIBAJ&sjid=Us8EAAAAIBAJ&dq=tony%20danza%20hudson%20street&pg=6936%2C2406385 and http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=V98qAAAAIBAJ&sjid=1fEDAAAAIBAJ&dq=tony%20danza%20hudson%20street&pg=1607%2C303870 and http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=htNRAAAAIBAJ&sjid=zW8DAAAAIBAJ&dq=tony%20danza%20hudson%20street&pg=6769%2C1995252

For The Official website of Tony Danza go to http://www.dailydanza.com/

For a Website dedicated to Lori Loghlin go to http://www.loriloughlin.org/

For The Lori Loughlin Photo Gallery go to http://www.fanpix.net/gallery/lori-loughlin-pictures.htm