Underrated Series: Picket Fences Still Looks Good 30 Years Later

 

 

During the more than fourteen plus years that David E. Kelley’s production company existed the emblem for when the end-credits rolled was an old woman in a rocking chair turning off her TV. The theme music that played before she shut it off was the opening theme to Picket Fences.

I always smiled when I heard it, and not just because I remembered the series fondly. In a way Picket Fences was my gateway series into adult TV. Up until I was thirteen or fourteen, most of the TV series I watched as a child were either reruns of old comedy series, some contemporary sitcoms such as Full House or Charles in Charge, and maybe the occasional rerun of Magnum PI or Dukes of Hazard neither of which involved much heavy lifting even for a twelve year old or were beyond my comprehension. The first broadcast drama I was ever really riveted to from beginning to end was an episode of Picket Fences. I don’t remember exactly when I saw the show – I know it was in 1993 and I don’t know if it was a rerun or a new episode. What I do remember is that the story centered around a bank robbery taking place in a small town and that much of the story centered around the sheriff and the doctor trying to help this bank robber known as the Dancing Bandit, who I recognized as Marlee Matlin. I don’t remember the exact details of the story but I do remember the episode ended with her character getting shot and apparently being carried off in a helicopter – and then we learned it had been a deception for her to escape.

From that point on, I more or less watched every episode until the series premature cancellation in the spring of 1996.  It should have gutted me more, but by that time I had discovered The X-Files, Chicago Hope and Homicide. Not long after that I began to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer and by that point, I was pretty much committed to my destiny.

Picket Fences was considered by critics and many awards shows as one of the best shows of the 1990s but it was quickly forgotten after its cancelation that fall. That is sad but not a surprise. It wasn’t as groundbreaking as the other classic series of the 1990s or groundbreaking in the sense that ER, NYPD Blue, Law & Order or The X-Files were. It didn’t launch the same style of careers to stardom that Homicide eventually would. And while the series essentially gave David E. Kelley his official position as one of television’s greatest and most successful showrunners a full five years before the other triumvirate of Davids that essentially put HBO and Peak TV on the map, Picket Fences has never had the same shelf life. That’s remarkable for a series that won Best Drama twice in consecutive years and fourteen over all, including wins in every single acting category.

Part of this is due to the bizarre nature of Kelley when it comes to his own work. When the era of DVDs became mainstream in the 2000s, he was one of the few major contemporaries who never embraced it. Steven Bochco took a similar approach: his shows such as Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue did not come into a full release until the DVD era was practically over. Neither did the creative forces behind St. Elsewhere and David Lynch waited over a decade to have the second season of Twin Peaks come out on DVD. But Kelley was always particularly resistant with every series he has made; only the first seasons of Picket Fences and The Practice were ever released on DVD in America, Ally McBeal did not get a full release until more than a decade after its run was over and Chicago Hope and Boston Public never had their series released on DVDs in America. Only Boston Legal was ever entirely released on DVD and that was more likely due to the fact that by the middle of the 2000s every series on television was getting that treatment, whether they were a success or a failure. Similarly Kelley has been equally resistant to releasing his shows on streaming: it’s only fairly recently that Ally McBeal and The Practice have been released in their entirety on Amazon.

Part of this may have been due to the fact that so many of Kelley’s series were written primarily of the era they took place: many of them have dated very quickly and some, especially Ally McBeal, aged badly while they were still on the air. However I’d argue that despite the problems with contemporary references, Picket Fences not holds up better than most of Kelley’s shows but is by far the most relevant to contemporary audiences.

Perhaps that’s because of what an outlier Picket Fences was not only for TV today but for Kelley in general. Capitalizing on the success of Twin Peaks, the broadcast networks went through a phase in which they developed series around ‘quirky’ small towns. CBS was by far the most successful of these with both this show and the similarly brilliant Northern Exposure. You can basically have heard the pitch at CBS: ‘it’s like Twin Peaks but its more sane’ and that may have been what helped Kelley get his foot in the door. He never had to take it out again for the next twenty years.

What’s more remarkable, in hindsight, is just how different Picket Fences is in comparison to everything else Kelley did in the future. For one thing, every other series he did dealt with quirky people but it was done in a metropolis setting, usually Boston but he also did Chicago and, in his underrated Harry’s Law, Cincinnati. Furthermore, all future series would center around a single group of professionals, almost always attorneys but doctors and teachers as well. Picket Fences is the only series he would ever try to do where he try to express his theme of dealing with contemporary issues in a setting that not only wasn’t a big city but tried to look at as many angles as possible. Considering just how brilliant a job he did, it’s very frustrating he never tried anything remotely like it for the rest of his career (so far)

There’s also the fact that the major roles in the cast, in contrast to how television was doing things basically at every point in its history, were not particularly young. At the center of the story is the Brock family, headed by Jimmy, the sheriff of Rome played by Tom Skerritt, and his wife Jill, the town doctor played by Kathy Baker. Their eldest daughter Kimberly (who the family sees having sex with her boyfriend in the opening minutes of the Pilot) works for Rome’s prominent defense attorney “Douglas Wambaugh for the Defendant!” played by Fyvush Finkel who had spent his career in the theater and television for decades but achieved superstardom at the age of seventy. The town judge was Henry Bone, played by Ray Walston. All of these actors had been laboring in the system with mixed success in their career for decades: all of them won Emmys for their work on Picket Fences and all enjoyed immense success for the rest of their careers.

Nor were they the only actors to have their careers refreshed because of Picket Fences. Ever since she had won her Academy Award in her legendary debut in Children of A Lesser God, Matlin had found herself unable to find consistent work, most of it unworthy of her. In her performance on Picket Fences she won an Emmy for Best Guest Actress in a Drama and her character would be brought back to the series on multiple occasions, finally becoming a series regular in the last season. Matlin has worked consistently ever since in television, having incredible recurring roles on The West Wing, The L Word and the underrated Switched at Birth. I think there’s a line connecting Matlin’s success in Picket Fences to her eventual return to at the Academy Awards last year for CODA. Kelley in particular gave her career new life.

While this series did give fresh life to so many careers that had been stunted, it propelled many new ones into the spotlight. Holly Marie Combs would go one to superstardom after leaving Picket Fences in the WB series Charmed. Don Cheadle launched his career as the DA who would combat with Wambaugh for the first three seasons, often in exasperation. Lauren Holly essentially launched her career in TV in her role as Maxine, one of the town’s deputies: the relationship she had with her partner Kenny (Costas Mandylor) simmered for two seasons before it exploded in one of the most erotic love scenes I’ve seen on network TV in my years of viewing. Other veteran actors such as Roy Dotrice, Leigh Taylor Young and Dabbs Greer became recognized for their work here in some of the most brilliant performance they did in their career.

Picket Fences was also an outlier for Kelley when it came to issues. As anyone who even watches a few minutes of almost every other series Kelley’s politics are screaming liberal, and after 9-11, became almost maddeningly obvious in every series he did. It might merely be because this series takes place in an era prior to the War on Terror that it’s (relatively) subtle. I don’t think that’s as much a factor as it is due to location. One can easily speak to being liberal in Boston or Chicago, but Picket Fences took place in small-town Wisconsin in an era where the state was far closer to being red that it was purple.  There’s also the fact that its easier to speak in broad strokes about issues when you’re only going to be defending one client for one week; when you have to live in the same town as the people you’re accusing you can’t be as provocative. The man you’re calling a killer today may be on your jury tomorrow.

So Kelley (who wrote almost every episode of the first three seasons) was subtler in his approach. Yes, most of his episodes did involve crimes and ended up in a courtroom but there was more to it than that. For one thing, this is the only series in Kelley’s entire oeuvre where the police are not merely at the center of everything they happens, they are treated sympathetically. Kelley never had any problem pushing that cops and prosecutors were monsters trying to railroad the justice system in The Practice and Boston Legal; in Rome, the cops were as human as everybody else, capable of making honest mistakes and falling victim to common emotions. In one episode Maxine and Kenny are watching a man pass a stop sign looking wobbly, but because he’s a block away from his home, they let him leave a warning. A minute later, he drives into the wall of another house and a man is injured. Jimmy spends much of the episode chewing Max out, but Max goes through her own level of agony in the episode. Cops are allowed to make mistakes in Rome that are part of being human rather than being evil.

There’s also the very ‘fluid’ situation when it comes to politics. I honestly don’t remember how many mayors Rome went through in its brief run, but Wambaugh was always busy defending them. One shot a burglar in a home invasion…and then spontaneously combusted. (That’s Kelley.) The next mayor (Young) had some very liberal politics and was forced to resign because had a past in pornography. The man who led her impeachment (Dotrice) was the minister and next in line: he took himself out of contention to remove the conflict. The next man down was an old man who was suffering from Alzheimer’s, and he may have done the best job of them all. Eventually Marlee Matlin’s character took the job to fill a community service obligation.

Yes, it certainly seems absurd in hindsight and at the time, but perhaps Kelley was making a reflection on just how messy politics and politicians are on a national level by putting it on a local level? You look at several of our current Congress, I’d actually trade any of them for the Kissing Bandit.

And by having all of these bizarre, often violent actions take place in a small town, Kelley made all of the issues more pertinent and searing when they ever are when they’re ripped from the headlines. It’s one thing to have a school shooting storyline, but few shows then – and now – have ever done anything more real when Matthew Brock, who in a prank lead to the serious injury of a classmate, is shot in the halls of his junior high in front of his younger brother – and Wambaugh believes it is his duty to defend the shooter. And its not like it wasn’t groundbreaking in 1994 when the town minister is found in a compromising situation because he was caught masturbating in private. (On 1990s TV, the characters couldn’t even talk about except in euphemism.) One could never accuse Kelley of being subtle in how he does things – in one of the stories in the final season, the Pope witnesses a murder of a gay man and Wambaugh calls him into the courtroom saying that his opinion can’t be trusted because of the Catholic Church position on gay people. But then – and sometimes now, you do have to hit your viewers over the head and I’m still impress that Kelley was able to get away with it in 1995.

Many of the best episodes of Picket Fences ended with Judge Bone offering summations in which he would either admonish the jury for their verdict or (since he was often called in to make law) give a summation from the bench. Kelley would often do great writing for judges, who in the world of Law & Order and similar series, never get to have an opinion but few ever were able to deliver the gravity of the absolutely no b.s. tones that Ray Walston gave over and over again. It should have gotten tiresome after a while, but listening to him you really did think you were hearing the voice of God. He was the only man in Rome who everyone deferred to, the only one whose authority no one questioned. Yet there was always a gentleness to him. At one point when a man suffering from Alzheimer’s (Robert Cornthwaite) asked to be killed so he could give his son his heart, Bone was gentle with him. That same man later became mayor and Bone treated him the same way. Bone gave a profoundly moving elegy at the man’s funeral in the second season finale after his death, talking not about how he died but how he lived. After he spoke Wambaugh (who was his closest friend) usually the most loquacious speaker did something he never did and shut up. He merely knocked once on his grave as a gesture of farewell. The season ended with almost the entire town doing the same.

Considering all of the struggles that are now raging in small towns across America, considering that many of the flashpoints that Kelley discussed on Picket Fences are all the more relevant today as they were thirty years ago I was grateful to learn that the entire series is now streaming on Hulu. Perhaps some people will wonder what a series that aired on broadcast television in the 1990s can tells us about today. One of the most prominent storylines involves an African-American federal judge (played by the great Paul Winfield) who orders the integration of Rome’s schools. These good, salt-of-the-earth people begin to panic and ask for time to delay. The judge instead moves up the timeline from the next school year to within a few days. What happens in the two part episode I believe is pertinent for the viewer to discover but considering how much the fighting of so many racial issues that are playing out across America in towns just like Rome, Wisconsin, we can’t exactly pretend it might not be instructive to see what the past might teach us. By the standards of network TV of the era – and today – its not comforting but there is some hope.