'Barney Miller' Was Canceled Or Just Ended?!?

[TMC]

[Will Dockery]

Originally Posted by catlover79

I heard that the ratings had been declining in the last couple of seasons, and that co-creator/writer Danny Arnold decided to end the show. That's what I've read, anyway. In any case, the show had gone on for 8 seasons. It couldn't go on forever, and it was nice that the show got a real series finale to wrap everything up.

Watching the final episode now... where the cast all their separate ways

Now, apparently the first B.M. in on... opens at home with his wife?

[SueWalsh]

Danny Arnold decided to end it. He though the show had begun to repeat itself and couldn’t find any new scripts he was satisfied with.

[TVFactFan]

Both

I wanna believe finishing below 40 two seasons in a row led to cancellation

[JSP]

Originally Posted by TVFactFan

Both

I wanna believe finishing below 40 two seasons in a row led to cancellation

Yes, I have a feeling if it was still in the top ten they would have kept going.

[SueWalsh]

Originally Posted by TVFactFan

Both

I wanna believe finishing below 40 two seasons in a row led to cancellation

It wasn’t canceled. ABC wanted another season. Danny Arnold said no.

[sara]

Either way they ended on a high. Barney Miller's final season won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series.

[TVFactFan]

Originally Posted by SueWalsh

It wasn’t canceled. ABC wanted another season. Danny Arnold said no.

Wanted another season of BM at #54 and cancelled Making the Grade at #38? I find that hard to believe

[SueWalsh]

Originally Posted by TVFactFan

Wanted another season of BM at #54 and cancelled Making the Grade at #38? I find that hard to believe

Do you have some strange fixation on ratings numbers? That’s all you talk about. The show won the Emmy for outstanding comedy show that year. And yes, Danny Arnold pulled the plug, not ABC. Both Max Gail and Hal Linden told me this.

[TVFactFan]

Originally Posted by SueWalsh

Do you have some strange fixation on ratings numbers? That’s all you talk about. The show won the Emmy for outstanding comedy show that year. And yes, Danny Arnold pulled the plug, not ABC. Both Max Gail and Hal Linden told me this.

Well the newspaper said cancelled so...

[PracTz]

Originally Posted by TVFactFan

Well the newspaper said cancelled so...

So, it's possible the newspaper could have been mistaken while Mr. Gail and Mr. Linden being closer to the action could be telling the truth of what happened.

[SueWalsh]

Originally Posted by TVFactFan

Well the newspaper said cancelled so...

I think Hal Linden and Max Gail are more reliable sources than the newspaper. They were actually there after all.

[TMC]

Originally Posted by SueWalsh

I think Hal Linden and Max Gail are more reliable sources than the newspaper. They were actually there after all.

http://www.tvparty.com/70-barney-miller.html

Broadcast from January 23, 1975, to May 20, 1982, on ABC, Barney Miller is considered one of the best sitcoms of the 1970s. The show grew out of an unsold television pilot, The Life and Times of Captain Barney Miller, airing in the summer of 1974, as part of an ABC summer anthology series, Just for Laughs, where the network would dump pilots they didn’t intent to pick up. The networks would take the best of the rejected batch and give them an airing in primetime during the summer when viewership was down, a way to get back some of the cost of that pilot.

Basically, star Hal Linden insists, the end of Barney Miller came down not to ratings, but to keeping good writers who were constantly getting lured to other projects. “It was never canceled,” Linden told the Television Academy. “The next to last season [producer Danny Arnold] was going to close it. Sitcoms are by definition self destructive. That is, they feed on themselves… We had, what, let’s say five writing sources. A team, a writer, another team. Five, maybe six writing sources, something like that. You know, numbered [descending] 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. The minute you have a show that’s a hit, the number 2 team, their agent is at every network… So you’re always losing your number 2 team every year. And maybe number 3 team!”

That being said, Barney Miller finished it’s last season at #54, at the bottom of the ratings. Producer Danny Arnold’s failing health also contributed, every script went through him for revisions until he suffered a heart attack. Barney Miller was one of the few sitcoms of the period that occasionally mentioned the then-current year.

Sitcom writer Tom Reeder described the stress of working on the show, “In the early years, Danny benefited from the heroic writing efforts of Chris Hayward, who was a veteran writer, and rookies Tony Sheehan and Reinhold Weege who, like me, didn't know any better. They were the Barney Miller writing staff. My agent wisely turned down Danny's annual offers of staff jobs, negotiating freelance assignments (so-called "multiple deals") for me instead. Even so, the pace was frantic—on one assignment I was given 3 hours to write the story outline. On another occasion, a friend came into my office at ABC-Vine Street and said, ‘Hey, Reeder, want to go get some lunch?’ I pointed to the paper in my typewriter and said, ‘This script is on the stage—thanks anyway.’”