Barney Miller - Production

Production

As the show progressed, and especially by the final seasons, the program became unusual for its increasing resemblance to a stage play, in that its scenes almost never strayed from the single set of the precinct station's squadroom, with its prominent open-barred holding cell, and Miller's adjoining office. Almost all of the action and dialog took place on this single set. Characters came and went, but they were virtually never shown outside or in other buildings. Moreover, each episode in the later seasons usually took place within the course of a single workday. Thus, Barney Miller tended to obey two of the three classical unities of drama, unity of place and unity of time. The third unity, unity of action, was not followed, since each episode had multiple subplots.

The show became notorious in the industry for its marathon taping sessions. In the beginning, it was taped in front of a studio audience. After the audience left, creator and executive producer Danny Arnold would begin to rewrite and restage scenes, sometimes heavily so; a taping session that began in the afternoon or early evening would then continue on into the early morning hours. Max Gail referred to this in the Jack Soo retrospective episode; he remarked that one of the clips shown was a scene that "we finished around 2:30 in the morning." In a 1977 blooper, a crew member mentions it being 3:15 a.m.

Writer Tom Reeder described working on the show:

Danny Arnold was the creator of the show, and especially in the early years, he was a marvel. When he was "on", he could spin out entire scenes, ad-libbing dialogue — and great jokes — for every character. By the time those scenes got to script form, though, he obsessively rewrote them.

That's true of a lot of showrunners, but Danny couldn't seem to stop himself. Sometime during season 2 (or maybe it was 3) the show was no longer taped in front of an audience, partly because the script was rarely done by show night. When one season began, six pages were in print. Not six scripts — six pages of one script.

This meant that on the day the show was taped, the actors would hang around on the stage, waiting for pages to be sent down. Then — sometimes at 2 a.m. — they would have to learn new scenes. Ron Carey (Officer Levitt) would get his fairly quickly: "Here's your mail, Captain." On the other hand, poor Steve Landesberg (Dietrich) might have to memorize long speeches explaining how nuclear fission works.

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."

Marty and Darryl were among the earliest recurring gay characters on American television. Danny Arnold worked closely with the Gay Media Task Force, an activist group that worked on LGBT representation in media, in developing the characters. Initially both characters were presented in a stereotypically effeminate manner but in later appearances Darryl began dressing and speaking in a more mainstream fashion. Officer Zitelli's coming out was the first gay story arc on American television, occurring across the series' sixth and seventh seasons.