Barney Miller was the best show on TV for years and Fish was a big part of that. Tessio was good but Fish was great.
Fish: Look, you can't stop the years from passing by. There comes a time when changes have to be made. Someone younger and stronger comes along to fill your shoes and a person has to gracefully step aside. Well, I'm not willing to do that. The way I figure, I'm worth more on restricted duty than all of you put together on full time. Good night, gentlemen.
My finest memories of Barney Miller are as a little kid sitting on my knees in front of the living room coffee table eating my TV dinner watching Wojo do that stupid doooot sound through his hand and wondering what planet that creepy Asian dude was from. Fish looked like he was about to die in every episode and Barney came off as a sad sack asshole. Fuck that show. RIP Lemmy
The tragedy of Abe Vigoda's career was when he demanded and got the spin-off from Barney Miller after the second season. The producer couldn't say no to him because of his age and his talent and the fact that he'd never headlined a show. The guy who came up with Barney Miller and who was writing the show as the lead writer thought it was a really bad idea because he thought Fish was a great character played by a great character actor but he needed to be in the precinct to stay great. He finally assented to the spin-off "Fish" and wrote Arthur Dietrich into the show and Fish gradually out of it. Fish ran for a season and a half and was then cancelled because Vigoda wanted a much bigger salary than he had originally contracted for, being the main focus of the show. He was a great character actor and he should have been on Barney Miller for all 8 seasons. Dietrick was great also but nobody really took Fishes place in the ensemble. When Fish was replaced on Barney Miller I was away at school, no TV there at all, and with no internet to keep up on events I was clueless as to his absence. I came back for the Christmas holiday and was watching the show and no Fish and I turned to my sister at the end and asked her where Fish was and she dead-panned "Abe Vigoda died, didn't you hear?" I actually believed her because Pete Duell had died a couple of years before while doing Alias Smith and Jones. She strung me along until Fish came on afterwards.
Is there an official number of times, Abe was rumored to have died? Seems I remember 4 or 5, going back years.
Abe Vigoda (actor): in 1982, People magazine referred to him as 'the late Abe Vigoda'. He then posed for a photograph showing him sitting up in a coffin, holding the magazine in question. The same mistake was made in 1987 when a reporter for television station WWOR, Channel 9 in Secaucus, New Jersey, mistakenly referred to him as "the late Abe Vigoda".[260] She realized and corrected her mistake the next day.[260] Vigoda claims that during the 1980s, the widespread belief that he was dead cost him work.[261] Erroneous reports of Vigoda's death became something of arunning joke, such as in television sketches. The website "Abe Vigoda Status" featured nothing but a smiling photo of Vigoda, a live clock calibrated to the day and second, and the advisory "Abe Vigoda is" followed by the up-to-the-minute information of "alive" until he died in 2016, whereupon the website went offline due to the number of requests, then eventually returned with the update that Vigoda was indeed dead.[262] _
