Picket Fences

Picket Fences is a 60-minute drama which initially ran from September 18, 1992 to June 26, 1996 on the CBS television network in the United States. This show was created by Emmy-award winning producer David E. Kelley. The show sometimes struggled to maintain a stable prime-time audience, and had wildly fluctuating ratings. In its first season on the air, it only placed 80th in the primetime Nielsen ratings, and in its second season it moved just slightly to 66th.

Series Overview

The series follows the lives of the residents of the small town of Rome, Wisconsin, where weird things happen, including cows giving birth to human babies, transgender teachers, and a spate of people turning up dead in freezers. Struggling to maintain order in this odd community is Sheriff Jimmy Brock (Tom Skerritt). He is married to the town doctor, Jill (Kathy Baker), his second wife. They attempt to bring up their three children, Kimberly (Holly Marie Combs) (from Jimmy's first marriage), Matthew (Justin Shenkarow) and Zachary (Adam Wylie), normally. Lauren Holly and Costas Mandylor played impulsive and immature sheriff's deputies Max and Kenny. Bombastic lawyer Douglas Wambaugh (Fyvush Finkel), who usually irritated Judge Henry Bone (Ray Walston), whose rulings seemed to be directed more by his own moral compass than by point of law. After several prosecutors came and went, Don Cheadle joined the cast as John Littleton. Kelly Connell played medical examiner Carter Pike, an incel, and Zelda Rubenstein portrayed police dispatcher Ginny Weedon. Other well-known actors who were in the cast included Marlee Matlin, Richard Masur, and Dabbs Greer.

Picket Fences, like many shows of its era, frequently deals with difficult subject matter, including abortion, homosexuality (and homosexual adoption), transsexuality, belief in God, medical ethics, polygamy, polyamory, adolescent sexuality, cryonics, the Holocaust, shoe fetishism, masturbation, spontaneous human combustion and constitutional rights. Illustrative of the subject matter is that the regular cast included a judge, two lawyers, and a coroner. Religious issues were frequently discussed, and the characters of the town's Catholic priest and Anglican priest were frequently recurring roles.

Mayors

One of the oddest aspects of the series is the revolving door of town mayors who never seemed to last very long. Holding one of the most risky positions in TV history, these are Rome’s mayors (and their portrayers), with their fates on the series:

Mayor Bill Pugen (Michael Keenen): spontaneous combustion after murder conviction
Mayor Rachel Harris (Leigh Taylor-Young): hounded from office for starring in an adult film
Acting Mayor Jill Brock (Kathy Baker): jailed, lost bid for re-election
Mayor Ed Lawson (Richard Masur): entombed in a freezer by his wife, then decapitated
Acting Mayor Howard Buss (Robert Cornthwaite): suffered from Alzheimer's Disease, fatally shot by his son
Acting Mayor Maxine Stewart (Lauren Holly): shot and wounded by a shock jock’s fan
Mayor Laurie “The Dancing Bandit” Bey (Marlee Matlin): mayor at series end, despite bank robbery convictions. She was offered the job as part of her 3000 hours community service sentencing.

Main Cast

Tom Skeritt as Sheriff Jimmy Brock
Kathy Baker as Dr Jill Brock
Costas Mandylor as Kenny Lacos
Lauren Holly as Maxine Stewart
Holly Marie Combs as Kimberly Brock
Justin Shenkarow as Matthew Brock
Adam Wylie as Zack Brock
Fyvush Finkel as Douglas Wambaugh
Ray Walston as Judge Henry Bone
Kelly Connell as Carter Pike
Don Cheadle as D.A. John Littleton

Episodes

Picket Fences had a Total of 88 episodes and Four seasons.

Crossovers

The series had two crossover episodes with another David E. Kelley series, Chicago Hope. One occurring on Picket Fences and one occurring on Chicago Hope. In the first crossover episode Dr Jill Brock accompanies Douglas Wambaugh to Chicago Hope Hospital over concerns of his heart. In the Second crossover episode Wambaugh is back at Chicago Hope Hospital causing trouble for the doctors.

Awards

It won fourteen Emmy Awards (including "Best Dramatic Series" twice) and one Golden Globe in its four-year run. A substantial following for the show persists to today, and it's popular as reruns in western Europe, especially in France, Germany, and Denmark. It is currently being rerun in French in Canada on Radio-Canada under the title Bienvenue a Rome, USA, it is currently airing in the UK on The Hallmark Channel.

Trivia

There are two actual towns called Rome in Wisconsin, one 75 miles north of Madison and the other 45 miles west of Milwaukee. A long-running story arc about busing black children in from Green Bay, Wisconsin suggests neither of the real Romes is the location for the fictional Rome. A map on a TV news report (within Picket Fences) during this storyline showed Rome east of Green Bay, rather near Kewaunee, Wisconsin.

Exteriors for the show were mostly shot in Monrovia, CA, a suburb of Los Angeles, CA. Generally these were simple exteriors of buildings such as City Hall (side entrance to Monrovia City Hall), the Logan County Courthouse (the United Methodist Church of Monrovia) and Dr. Jill Brock's Office (a Red Cross office at the time, now an Annex to Monrovia City Hall) shot by the second unit. Over the period of 1992-1996 several extensive and large scenes were also filmed in town, including two parades where many citizens and organizations within Monrovia participated in the filming.

Both Tom Skerritt and Justin Shenkarow are the only two actors to appear in all 88 episodes of the series.

Kathy Baker was the runner-up actress in terms of a number of episodes an actor appeared in. She appeared in almost every episode of the series, between 1992-1996, missing only 1 episode in the final season, for a total of 87 of the 88 series produced.

Holly Marie Combs was the third place actress in terms of a number of episodes an actor appeared in. She appeared in almost every episode of the series, between 1992-1996, missing 4 episodes in the final season, for a total of 84 of the 88 episodes produced. After the series was cancelled, Combs later gained fame on Charmed.

In the first season, Ray Walston had a recurring role, but since his character proved to be so popular, he was offered a starring role beginning with the 1993 season. At that time, after he joined the cast, he didn't miss a single episode of the show.

References

The actual descriptive text portion of the article above (and its Contents menu) are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License then in effect published by the Free Software Foundation. The text article uses material from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picket_Fences (retrieval date: 2007-05-27) and is provided "as-is" and without warranty. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify only the actual descriptive text portion of the article above (and its Contents Box) under the GNU Free Documentation License. A copy of the license is available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License. Any advertisements (or active links not embedded in the actual article) and the layout or selection thereof are excluded from such license.
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