In “Date Rape,” Cagney and Lacey Struggle With Their Place in the Male-Dominated...

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...Police Force

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Brian looks at how Cagney and Lacey struggled with letting their male-dominated job affect their views and actions in "Date Rape."



Today, we look at how Cagney and Lacey struggled with letting their male-dominated job affect their views and actions in “Date Rape.”

This is a delayed Year of Great TV Episodes, where every day from March 2nd on this year (plus January 1st-March 1st of 2024), we’ll take a look at great TV episodes. Note that I’m not talking about “Very Special Episodes” or episodes built around gimmicks, but just “normal” episodes of TV shows that are notable only because of how good they are.

All this month, I’ll be spotlighting great women-centric TV episodes.

Cagney and Lacey was an acclaimed TV police drama about Christine Cagney and Mary Beth Lacey, two police officers who got promoted to detective together. The show was about these two female detectives working together in an otherwise all-male detective squad at a New York precinct (by the end of the series, there was one other female detective on the squad).

Cagney was originally played by Loretta Swit in the TV movie that served as the show’s pilot, and then Meg Foster in the first season. Sharon Gless took over in Season 2. Lacey was played by Tyne Daly all the way through. Cagney was single, while Lacey was married with two sons (and later, a daughter).

“Date Rape” was in the second season, and it had two overlapping plots. One was Cagney celebrating the fact that they were both invited to a birthday party of one of their fellow detectives, which involved a stripper. Lacey skipped the event, but Cagney celebrated the fact that they were finally being included. Cagney very much tried to be “one of the guys,” while Lacey never felt the need. Part of that had to do with Cagney growing up with a cop father, and part of it had to do with her desire to rise in the police force, while Lacey didn’t have the same ambitions.

After their boss, Lt. Samuels (Al Waxman) played a prank on Detective Victor Isbecki (Martin Kove) by setting him up with a female impersonator, Isbecki gets him back with the help of the other detectives by tricking him into dating a prostitute. The problem, though, is that this is his first timing dating after his divorce, and so he’s taking it really slow, and Lacey can’t bear the thought of their boss finding out that it is all a lie. They ultimately pay the prostitute $150 to lie to Samuels, and say she has to move out of state suddenly. The other male detectives give them grief for ruining their fun, but they bite back.

The main area where their viewpoints differ from the men is when a woman (played by the great Kathleen Lloyd) comes in to report that she had been raped on a date two weeks prior with a guy she met at a singles club. She was motivated to report it because the guy keeps calling her, asking her for another date. Anyone watching knows the lady was pretty much screwed (a date rape in 1983 that wasn’t reported until after her bruises had healed?), but the guys are all SO dismissive of her that it leads to Cagney and Lacey ALSO being kind of dismissive to her, with Cagney, in particular, being rough on her, noting that her attitude is nothing compared to how a defense attorney would eat her up if her case ever went to trial.

The woman ends up dropping the case, but then, after she berates the guy one night (as he keeps calling her) and taunts him with the fact that she has a photo of him, he breaks into her apartment, beats her into a coma, and rapes her again. Lacey is distraught, and Cagney says that she gets it, she’s to blame, but Lacey corrects her, and says that she was right there with Cagney. They BOTH let the guy’s dismissive view of the victim color their opinion of her. It’s good stuff.

They track the guy (who claims he was an opera singer) to his agent, who admits that she stopped representing him after he raped HER on a date, too. When she talks about how she failed the woman, Cagney SORT of tries to make her feel better by noting that a LOT of people failed her. Dang.

In the end, they find the guy at his job as a singing waiter, and there’s a good bit where Lacey tricks him by pretending to be a fan, and she gets the first handcuff on him, but he then punches Cagney, but Lacey tackles him, and gets the other cuff on.

The woman comes out of the coma, and will make a full recovery, so the episode had a happy-ish ending, but it was a great look at how much rape victims are dismissed unless they have the most clear-cut case possible.

Terry Louise Fisher, a writer and producer on the show, one of the most prominent voices on the show (she later co-created L.A. Law) wrote the episode.