Author: Roger Cormier

Created by Steven Bochco, the mind behind one of the most innovative network shows ever in Hill Street Blues, and Terry Louise Fisher, a former entertainment lawyer, novelist, and Cagney & Lacey writer/producer, L.A. Law ran for eight seasons on NBC from 1986 to 1994, collecting 15 Emmy Awards during its run. The series—which premiered 30 years ago, on September 15, 1986—centered around the ambitious (and horny) lawyers and junior staff of the Los Angeles law firm McKenzie, Brackman, Chaney and Kuzak. The attorneys tackled then-hot-button issues and made American television history while doing so.

1. COMPOSER MIKE POST WROTE THE THEME MUSIC AROUND A CAR TRUNK SLAMMING.

Steven Bochco told composer Mike Post that he wanted to start the opening sequence with a car trunk slamming shut. Post, who had worked with Bochco on Hill Street Blues (and also created the iconic theme music for Law & Order) wrote the L.A. Law theme based on that directive.

2. CORBIN BERNSEN HAD TROUBLE FIGURING OUT HIS CHARACTER.

Corbin Bernsen’s first audition with Bochco in New York didn’t go very well. He auditioned for the role of Michael Kuzak (which eventually went to Harry Hamlin) and was suffering from the flu. Bochco thought it was a “little disappointing” because he thought Bernsen was good-looking. The actor went to Los Angeles and caught a woman with blonde hair turning her head to watch him run down Mulholland Drive, which is when he locked into who the character of Arnie Becker was. Bernsen said it was smooth sailing after that. “I went in the next day and essentially the day after I got the job.”

3. JILL EIKENBERRY WAS BATTLING BREAST CANCER DURING THE SHOW’S FIRST SEASON.

After shooting the pilot, Jill Eikenberry—who played Ann Kelsey—was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her husband, Michael Tucker (Stuart Markowitz on the show), called Bochco to say the two couldn’t do the show because of it, but Bochco assured them that Eikenberry would be off the set by 5 p.m. every day to go to UCLA for radiation treatments. Going against their publicist’s advice, Eikenberry revealed the ordeal in 1988. (They later fired the publicist.)

4. SUSAN DEY AUDITIONED IN AN ODD PLACE.

Susan Dey read for Grace Van Owen at a grammar school picnic. (Both Dey and Bochco’s children were there).

5. THEY SPENT MORE THAN $1 MILLION ON THE SETS.

Three sets were built for L.A. Law—including an exact replica of a Los Angeles courtroom, complete with a removable jury box and a courtroom elevator—to the tune of more than $1 million. Keeping the cast in designer duds was no cheap affair either; the wardrobe budget was about $40,000 per episode.

6. HARRY HAMLIN IS EATING SOMETHING IN EVERY CONFERENCE ROOM SCENE.

“If you go back and watch the pilot as the very first conference room scene ends, I reach over and pull a sandwich toward me,” Hamlin told the Los Angeles Times. “I picked it up as they were shooting my last bit. I had my mouth full of food. We shot another conference room scene, and there was a plate of croissants. I thought, ‘I will make this a thing.’ If you look go back and look, I will be eating in every conference room scene. It became a running gag with the prop department.”

7. TERRY LOUISE FISHER MADE UP THE VENUS BUTTERFLY.

In the ninth episode of the series, titled “The Venus Butterfly,” Stuart (Tucker) wins Ann (Eikenberry) over with his mysterious sex move, known as The Venus Butterfly. Bochco initially told Eikenberry about the idea late one night over the phone while she was visiting her mother in Wisconsin, but it was Fisher who wrote that part of the episode, which would later win the co-creators the Emmy for Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series. Fisher insisted she had just made it up, but viewers wrote in and begged the writers to tell them what it was. A perfume company and erotic toy manufacturer asked Bochco to purchase the rights to the name “Venus Butterfly,” but he turned them down.

8. BOSTON ATTORNEY DAVID E. KELLEY CAME ON AS A WRITER DURING THE FIRST SEASON.

While working as a lawyer in Boston, David E. Kelley wrote the movie From the Hip (1987) in his free time, which landed him an agent and caught the attention of Bochco, who hired him as a writer for L.A. Law after reading just the first 30 pages of that script. Kelley asked for a five-month leave of absence from his law firm, but L.A. Law quickly turned into a full-time job. After Bochco left the show at the end of the third season, Kelley was promoted to executive producer.

9. BOCHCO LIKED TO PUNISH HIS BROTHER-IN-LAW’S CHARACTER.

Douglas Brackman, Jr. was played by Alan Rachins, who is married to Joanna Frank, Bochco’s sister (who played Brackman, Jr.’s wife, then ex-wife, Sheila on the series). In 1990, The New York Times listed some of the things poor Douglas went through on L.A. Law:

“During the five seasons that ‘L.A. Law’ has been broadcast, the boorish, balding Douglas—in addition to being hung upside down in a hospital room with skin grafts on his posterior—has had a Slinky caught in his braces, has engaged the services of a sex therapist because sex gives him gas and makes him faint, flipped his toupee in aerobics class while trying to impress the young instructor, discovered he has a pair of boorish, balding half-brothers, been arrested in a sushi bar and has voted himself out of the senior partnership at the firm that bears his father’s name.”

It was enough that the third season was devoted to bringing Douglas “back to normalcy,” to counteract his many humiliations from season two.

10. THE SHOW INFLUENCED ACTUAL LAW, FOR GOOD AND BAD.

In 1990, a lawyer in Miami Beach argued to an (unconvinced) judge that the jury had acquitted the doctors in his client’s malpractice suit because a very similar case was a storyline in the previous night’s episode of L.A. Law, where the doctor defendant had also been found free of guilt (the judge had not seen the episode). In that same New York Times article, it was reported that L.A. Law was responsible for increased applications to law schools, and that attorneys had changed their approach to their attire and the way they talked to juries.

After Abby Perkins fought to regain custody of her son on the show, an attorney sent a letter to Michele Greene (the actress who portrayed Perkins) telling her that the storyline had affected the outcome of a child-abuse case in Texas.

11. EVEN DIANA MULDAUR WAS SHOCKED AT HER ELEVATOR DEATH.

Kelley explained that Diana Muldaur’s character, Rosalind Shays, was a “finite” character, because he never wanted her to become nicer over time or lose her edge. The more the writers thought about having her fall down an empty elevator shaft, the more it made sense to them. Kelley said that while he didn’t tell the actress she was going to perish before sending her the script to season five’s “Good to the Last Drop,” he had warned Muldaur in the past that her character wasn’t long for this world. In an interview, Muldaur claimed she had no idea Shays was going to die until reading the script. She refused to do the stunt herself; her stunt double needed 10 takes to get it right.

12. HOMER SIMPSON MADE AN APPEARANCE.

Dan Castellaneta, the voice of Homer Simpson, played a man fired from playing Homer Simpson at a theme park in the season seven premiere “L.A. Lawless.” He was hidden underneath a crude Homer costume. “Usually I don’t want to associate myself on camera as the voice of Homer Simpson,” Castellaneta said. “But this was so cool that I had to do it.”

13. IT FEATURED THE FIRST LESBIAN KISS ON AMERICAN NETWORK TELEVISION.

While Amanda Donohoe (who played C.J. Lamb) and Michele Greene’s kiss was groundbreaking, Greene revealed it was a sweeps stunt. “I think it was a positive step, especially at that time,” she said. “Now we have gay and lesbian characters having relationships on mainstream TV shows like Will & Grace and that is a big step from the days of Abby and C.J. Lamb. On L.A. Law they never intended to explore the issue of a relationship between two women; it was about ratings during sweeps so I always found it a bit cynical.” Some advertisers pulled their commercials for the episode, “He’s a Crowd,” but NBC simply replaced them and no money was lost.

14. TWO CHARACTERS TRANSFERRED FROM ANOTHER SHOW ON ANOTHER NETWORK, MAKING A DIFFERENT KIND OF TV HISTORY.

Civil Wars, an ABC series, was canceled, allowing lawyer Eli Levinson (Alan Rosenberg) and legal secretary Denise Iannello (Debi Mazar) to pop up on L.A. Law and join the cast in its final season. It was the first time primetime characters moved from one drama series to another network’s non-spinoff series. On L.A. Law, it was explained that Levinson was Stuart Markowitz’s cousin.

15. THERE’S A REBOOT IN THE WORKS FROM BOCHCO.

Original writer Bill Finkelstein told Bochco of an idea he had for a potential new version of the series. “I called my friends at Fox, because they own the show, and they were very interested in having a conversation, and so Billy and I sat down and we sort of reconceptualized what L.A. Law would look like and be about over 30 years later,” Bochco told Variety earlier this year. Bochco reported that Fox is “very enthusiastic” about doing it.

Premiering 20 years ago today, Spin City was a multi-camera sitcom that marked a successful, more adult return to television for Michael J. Fox. It was co-created by Gary David Goldberg, the creator of Family Ties (the show that made Fox famous), along with Bill Lawrence, who would go on to create Scrubs.

Fox played Mike Flaherty, the Deputy Mayor of New York. The show at first went back and forth between Flaherty’s home life with his girlfriend, reporter Ashley Schaeffer (Carla Gugino), and his work life with the mayor and his staff, which included Connie Britton as Nikki Faber and Jennifer Esposito as Stacey Paterno.

Halfway through the first season, Gugino’s character was written off the show, making Spin City a workplace comedy. After Fox left due to his Parkinson’s disease, Charlie Sheen stepped in as a new Deputy Mayor, Charlie Crawford, for the final two seasons. In honor of the show’s 20th anniversary, here are some things you might not have known about Spin City.

1. JEFFREY KATZENBERG LIED TO GOLDBERG AND FOX TO GET THEM TO WORK TOGETHER AGAIN.

According to Nicole LaPorte’s book about DreamWorks, The Men Who Would Be King, there was tension between the creator of Family Ties and the undisputed star of that show. Without telling Goldberg, Katzenberg called Fox and told him Goldberg wanted to work on another series with him. Fox was interested. Katzenberg then called Goldberg and said Fox was eager to work with him again.

In Fox’s version of the story, he sent out feelers to different producers in 1995 asking if there was a place for him in the comedic TV landscape again. Goldberg called Fox and asked if he would be interested in working for him before sending him the pilot script. In Goldberg’s autobiography Sit, Ubu, Sit, Fox called Goldberg ostensibly about a mutual friend around Christmas 1995 and also mentioned his intention to return to television. Goldberg eventually decided to work with Fox, after Fox had turned down a script from someone else.

2. GOLDBERG AND LAWRENCE WROTE THE PILOT IN FOUR DAYS.

Goldberg, Lawrence, and Fox sketched out the characters surrounding “Alex Keaton with power” before Goldberg and Lawrence went off to pen the script. They faxed it over to Fox, who faxed them back 15 minutes later with the message, “I love it. I’m in. Let’s make a show.”

3. MIKE FLAHERTY WAS INSPIRED BY GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS.

The primary role model for Flaherty was George Stephanopoulos, Bill Clinton’s former political advisor, White House Communications Director, and Senior Advisor for Policy and Strategy. Stephanopoulos helped Goldberg and Lawrence sketch out the character, as did New York City political fixture Kevin McCabe (John Cusack claimed he was basically playing him in the 1996 film City Hall) and lawyer Sid Davidoff.

4. THE MAYOR SHARED A NAME WITH THE MAN CARTER HEYWOOD WAS BASED ON.

Barry Bostwick portrayed New York City mayor Randall Winston, which was also the name of the show’s associate producer. The real-life Winston asked Bostwick to make the character very popular so that he could get great tables at restaurants in New York. “Carter Heywood was loosely based on me,” Winston also revealed on a DVD feature. “We were two bald gay black men in New York.”

5. THE CO-CREATORS ARGUED OVER WHETHER TO LET RICHARD KIND AUDITION.

Goldberg insisted Richard Kind wasn’t right for the role of press secretary Paul Lassiter and didn’t even want him to audition. Lawrence disagreed, and won.

6. KIND AND FOX SPENT A MEMORABLE EVENING TOGETHER IN CHICAGO, WHICH FOX DIDN’T REMEMBER.

While Fox was shooting the film Light of Day (1987), he improvised with Kind at Second City in Chicago. Fox played Kind’s son, and the two got applause and laughter that lasted, in Kind’s memory, for one minute when Fox perfectly jumped into Kind’s arms. “It was memorable,” Kind said. “It was a memorable, memorable moment, and it’s still as clear as can be.”

When Kind showed up to the network audition he brought it up to Fox. “And [Michael] goes, ‘Richard, I’m sorry: Not only don’t I remember that night, I don’t remember being in Chicago.'”

7. IT WAS ORIGINALLY TITLED SPIN.

But SPIN Magazine wouldn’t give ABC the rights to the name.

8. THE FIRST FOUR SEASONS WERE SHOT IN NEW YORK.

It was only after Fox left the series that the show moved to Los Angeles. Bostwick believed that one of the reasons they filmed in New York at first was because Goldberg, Lawrence, and Fox would receive much less network interference.

9. STEPHEN COLBERT HIRED JENNIFER GARNER TO BABYSIT HIS KIDS AFTER THE TWO APPEARED IN AN EPISODE TOGETHER.

In the first season episode “The Competition,” James (Alexander Chaplin) tried to break up with Garner, who played his high school sweetheart, while Colbert portrayed Frank, a spokesman for the City Council speaker’s office. After working together on the episode, Colbert asked Garner to babysit his daughter. Garner later revealed that Colbert paid her less than $10 per hour, telling The New York Times that, “[Colbert] is so cheap!”

10. FOX SOMETIMES HAD TROUBLE HIDING HIS ILLNESS.

“He was seriously struggling with his own body,” Connie Britton remembered. “We would have delays for up to an hour and a half with a live audience waiting for us—and for Michael’s meds to kick in. It was really tough for him.” Fox was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease back in 1991, and was told he had 10 years left to work. He left Spin City in 2000.

11. FOX GAVE AN UPDATE ON HIS OTHER TV CHARACTER IN HIS FINAL EPISODE.

In “Goodbye,” Fox referred to a senator named Alex P. Keaton. In the same episode, Michael Gross (who played Fox’s father on Family Ties) made a cameo appearance. Goldberg and Fox were not shy about making Family Ties references on Spin City: Meredith Baxter (who played Fox’s mother) played Mike Flaherty’s mother in two episodes during the show’s first season, and Fox’s real-life wife and former Family Ties co-star Tracy Pollan appeared in a couple of episodes, too.

12. ALAN RUCK RECOGNIZED HIS FERRIS BUELLER ROOTS.

Just like in the classic John Hughes film, in the season five installment “Hey Judith,” Alan Ruck—who played Stuart Bondek on Spin City and Cameron in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off—looked out-of-place wearing a Detroit Red Wings jersey. This time, instead of Chicago, Ruck wore it to a Rangers game at Madison Square Garden.

13. MATTHEW BRODERICK, DENIS LEARY, JON CRYER, AND PATRICK DEMPSEY WERE ALL CONSIDERED TO REPLACE FOX.

Charlie Sheen ended up with the gig, despite reported concerns about his off-camera behavior. ”I probably wouldn’t have hired me had I been ABC,” Sheen told The New York Times in 2001. The ratings, at first, improved with Sheen on board. Ultimately, Fox would star in the first 100 episodes, and Sheen in the final 45.

Over the course of nine seasons, Ray Romano endeared himself to audiences as Ray Barone, a Long Island sportswriter juggling work and family, including his parents and older brother, who live right across the street. Here are some facts about the Emmy Award-winning series, which debuted 20 years ago today.

1. THE SHOW BEGAN AFTER RAY ROMANO DID A STAND-UP SET ON LATE SHOW WITH DAVID LETTERMAN.

“I was doing stand-up for 12 years,” Romano recounted to Larry King in 2005. “I did my first stand-up spot on Letterman and then the following week his company called me up to say, ‘We want to try to develop a show based around what we saw.'”

2. ROMANO DIDN’T LOVE THE TITLE.

“It was a title that, first of all, the critics … it invites hatred,” Romano explained. “It came about from a sarcastic comment my brother made, who is a police officer. And he said, ‘Look what I do for a living, and look at Raymond—yeah, everybody loves Raymond.’ So we used it as a working title. And it just grew on CBS, and we couldn’t get rid of it.”

3. DORIS ROBERTS THOUGHT SHE WOULD BE TOO BUSY TO EVEN AUDITION.

Doris Roberts was busy directing a play while the Marie auditions were taking place. The play’s producer made sure to have her available for 3:30 one fateful Monday. She beat out over 100 other women for the part.

4. PETER BOYLE WAS PERFECTLY ANGRY AT HIS AUDITION FOR FRANK.

Peter Boyle had trouble just getting into the studio lot. He then couldn’t find a parking space. Then he went into the wrong building. By the time he reached Romano and show creator/showrunner Philip Rosenthal he was, in his own words, “enraged”—and perfectly in character for Frank Barone. The topper of it all was that, according to Romano, the CBS president was going to give Boyle the gig anyway.

5. CBS OFFERED CAROL FROM FRIENDS THE PART OF DEBRA.

Jane Sibbett (Ross’s first ex-wife on Friends) declined the role once she discovered Romano was both unaware she had been offered the role by the network, and that Romano was pushing hard for Patricia Heaton to play his on-screen wife.

Maggie Wheeler, who played Janice on Friends, auditioned for the role of Debra, too. She ended up playing Debra’s friend Linda over the course of the series as a consolation prize. Heaton wasn’t officially cast until one week before the pilot began shooting.

6. RAY IS OLDER THAN HIS “OLDER” BROTHER.

Brad Garrett, who played Ray’s older brother Robert, was 36 when the series first started. Romano was a few months shy of his 39th birthday.

7. PHILIP ROSENTHAL’S WIFE GOT USED TO STORIES FROM HER MARRIAGE BEING WRITTEN INTO THE SHOW.

Monica Horan—who played Robert’s on-again-off-again girlfriend and eventual wife Amy—was married to the show’s creator, Phil Rosenthal. She got used to her arguments with Rosenthal ending up in scripts. Horan told People about an episode where Debra has PMS: “I’m hearing lines from conversations I had with my husband. Ray was telling Debra to take medication, and she was telling him she needed a hug. I was like, ‘Whoa.’ I was crying, then laughing, then crying. It was surreal.”

“Ninety percent of everything you hear on the show has been said to me or Ray Romano or one of the writers,” Rosenthal admitted in the same article. Horan claimed her favorite line to Rosenthal is, “You can say the right thing on TV, but why can’t you do it in real life?”

8. THE NAMES OF THE TWIN BOYS WERE CHANGED AFTER THE FIRST EPISODE.

In the pilot, the kids were known as Matthew and Gregory, but were subsequently turned into Michael and Geoffrey for the rest of the series. Romano’s own twin sons are named Matthew and Gregory; he decided that art was imitating life a little too closely and asked for the names to be changed. Matthew and Gregory not only got new names, they got new actors to play them: Rosenthal cast Sullivan and Sawyer Sweeten as Michael and Geoffrey, respectively. They were the real-life brothers of Madylin Sweeten, who played their TV sis, Ally.

The inclination to separate fact from fiction never seemed to apply to Ally, who kept her character name despite being based on Romano’s real daughter, also named Ally. Not only that, the real Ally (Alexandra Romano) played TV Ally’s friend Molly on the show.

9. RAY’S BROTHER WAS A POLICE OFFICER, WHOSE COLLEAGUES MADE FUN OF HIM.

“Well, my brother was—he is a retired cop now, but at the time he would take a lot of stuff from the other cops,” said Romano. “They think it’s a documentary.” While Garrett put his own spin on the character to differentiate Robert Barone from Rich Romano, there was a point where Ray’s brother—an NYPD sergeant—moved back in with their parents.

10. PATRICIA HEATON’S FATHER WAS A SPORTSWRITER, LIKE RAY BARONE.

Chuck Heaton was a sportswriter for The Cleveland Plain Dealer for 50 years. He’s mentioned in the season one episode “Recovering Pessimist” when Debra runs down a list of Ray’s competition for a Sportswriter of the Year award: “Chuck Heaton’s big story this year was ‘too much violence in boxing.’ Thanks for the scoop, Chuck.”

11. PETER BOYLE’S CAREER WAS ALLUDED TO TWICE IN THE SAME EPISODE.

In “Halloween Candy,” Frank gives the same speech about mortality he famously gave to Robert De Niro’s character in Taxi Driver (1976). He also dressed as Frankenstein’s monster, a nod to his work in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974).

12. THE SHOW MADE ROMANO THE HIGHEST PAID ACTOR ON TELEVISION.

Romano made $1.7 to $1.8 million per episode during the last two seasons of Raymond, surpassing Kelsey Grammer’s $1.6 million per episode salary for Frasier at the time.

13. THE SERIES ENDED WHEN THE WRITERS RAN OUT OF IDEAS.

“We ran out of ideas,” Rosenthal told The A.V. Club of why the show came to an end. “If you worked for me, I would say to you, ‘Go home, get in a fight with your wife, and come back in and tell me about it.’ And then we’d have a show. But after nine years, if we kept that up, our wives would leave us. And in California, that’s half. So we made sure that we got out before that happened.”

14. THE SERIES FINALE TAPING WAS DELAYED BY ONE WEEK.

Patricia Heaton fell ill, and by the intended showtime her voice was completely gone. The audience was sent home, and told to return seven days later.

15. RAYMOND IS LOVED ALL OVER THE WORLD.

The Voronins, or Воронины, the Russian adaptation which Rosenthal attempted to help, was Russia’s number one comedy, and performed original episodes after going through all 210 of the American installments. Local-language versions of the show were also produced in Egypt (Close Doors); Israel (You Can’t Choose Your Family); the Netherlands (Everybody Is Crazy About Jack); Poland (Everybody Loves Roman, which was canceled after four episodes), and the Czech Republic (Everybody Loves Rudy). In the United Kingdom, a pilot was shot (The Smiths).