Cagney & Lacey

The pilot for the 1980s detective show "Cagney & Lacey" was a CBS-TV movie starring Loretta Swit (Maj. Houlihan on MASH) and Tyne Daly. It aired on this date in 1981.  I've heard that Sharon Gless was considered for the Swit role, but couldn't get out of her contract with Universal Pictures.  Swit does a great job, and the movie was popular enough to lead to a series later that season, with Meg Foster as Cagney.
THEN, the show got re-tooled, with Gless finally able to play the role.  THEN the show got cancelled, THEN it got un-cancelled when ratings soared during summer reruns, and viewers mounted a letter-writing campaign.  Several years of Emmy awards followed, with the show safely ensconced on Mondays at 10 p.m., in a lineup that usually included fellow Emmy-winner "Kate & Allie" plus Emmy-less "Newhart."  Maybe Bob should have changed the name of his show to "Dick & Joanna" or "Joanna & Stephanie" to get some awards.
Anyhow, the pilot feels very much like a feature film (as it was originally intended).  I had no idea it had been included on a "Complete Series" DVD release.  I also didn't know it had been posted below:

Here's Tyne Daly talking about the pilot:

And here's Loretta Swit talking about the fact that MASH producers wouldn't let her leave the show to work on "Cagney."


Two interesting side notes to all this concerning Sharon Gless.  First, she was only free to do the show once her show "House Calls" was cancelled.  (That program starred Swit's former co-star Wayne Rogers, who had left MASH in its third season.)  Gless initially was hesitant to join "Cagney," since she didn't want to be seen as the actress who just replaces actresses.  (She had replaced Vanessa Redgrave on "House Calls").
Once Gless became Cagney, she worked closely with producers Barney Rosenzweig and Barbara Corday.  They had conceived the series while dating in the 1970s, when Corday gave Rosenzweig a book on feminism.  Eventually, the pair married in 1979, but divorced in 1990... and then Rosenzweig married Sharon Gless!  Yikes.
And for Tyne Daly, her husband Georg Stanford Brown won an Emmy for directing "Cagney & Lacey," and then they split in 1990, too.  Sad.