TV and Movies

[Oznell]

Bang on, @PilatesLover --  no one could do as much with his expressions and one-liners!   No wonder, as @Cakers3 asserts, he was able to steal every scene.

[ritasNo1Fan]

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@AZfem wrote:

@Oznell  I watched Barney Miller occasionally but I really liked him in Flower Drum Song, a favorite of mine. He fit his character so well!  A cute movie & the first American movie, I believe, with an all Asian cast. 

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He WAS a cutie, wasn't he!  Great character actor.

[PilatesLover]

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@Cakers3 wrote:

@PilatesLover  "Has anyone seen my legs?". 🤣

That scene was hilarious!!

Little bit of trivia - he always made awful coffee in that show and in real life Jack Soo said "It must have been the coffee" when he was being wheeled to surgery for esophageal cancer.

I always thought he stole every scene in Barney Miller.

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Aw.   So sad he had to suffer with that.

[Patriot3]

Love "Barney Miller".  It seems like every cast member had their quirks and humor.  Jack Soo was funny just looking at him because you just knew he was going to say something humorous.  His playing the ponies was hilarious.

It was a great cast even when one character left and another one joined.

[sunshine 919]

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@Etoile308 wrote:

@Oznell, great assessment of the show. So many unique characters.

Barney Miller is shown at 9:00pm and 9:30pm (ET) on the Antenna TV channel.

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Shows back then were ahead of their time, getting points across with violence and cursing.  Those writers were the best.

[AuntG]

The writers did an excellent job, but the actors owned their characters. I once read that Hal Linden was not a likable guy. Just guessing, but I wonder if he was a perfectionist, and much like Robert Reed on the Brady Bunch, expected storielines to make sense. They said Robert Reed would look up things in the encyclopedia and take minor factual errors to the producer and demand revisions. I suppose it could be an ego thing, but Hal appeared not to hog the spotlight. To me, it was a perfect ensemble cast.

[Oznell]

That's really interesting, @AuntG .  I always assumed that Hal Linden was very affable in real life, probably because I like his "Barney" character so much!   But it wouldn't surprise me if your intuition about perfectionism in him might be true.  That certainly seemed true in the case of Robert Reed, who was so talented, but additionally felt somewhat angry and frustrated by the limitations of his role on "Brady Bunch".

After "The Defenders",  in which Reed was so promising, he didn't seem to quite have the career trajectory he deserved...