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Picket Fences
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Picket Fences is a 60-minute television drama centering around the residents of the fictional community of Rome, Wisconsin. The show initially ran from September 18, 1992 to June 26, 1996 on the CBS television network in the United States. Picket Fences was created by producer David E. Kelley. The show sometimes struggled to maintain a stable prime-time audience, and had fluctuating ratings. In its first season on the air, it placed 80th in the prime-time Nielsen ratings, and in its second season it moved to 66th.
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.
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Encyclopedia
Picket Fences is a 60-minute television drama centering around the residents of the fictional community of Rome, Wisconsin. The show initially ran from September 18, 1992 to June 26, 1996 on the CBS television network in the United States. Picket Fences was created by producer David E. Kelley. The show sometimes struggled to maintain a stable prime-time audience, and had fluctuating ratings. In its first season on the air, it placed 80th in the prime-time Nielsen ratings, and in its second season it moved 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), usually irritated Judge Henry Bone (Ray Walston). Wambaugh refused to hear any confessions of guilt from his clients as he feared that it would only stand in the way of adequately defending them in court and Bone's 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 (who was regularly begging to be deputized), 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 frequently deals with difficult and bizarre subject matter, including abortion, homosexuality (and homosexual adoption), transsexuality, belief in God, medical ethics, polygamy, polyamory, adolescent sexuality (including nocturnal emissions), date rape, 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 3,000 hours community service sentencing.
Main cast
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 in each series. In the first, on Picket Fences, Dr. Jill Brock accompanies Douglas Wambaugh to Chicago Hope Hospital over concerns of his heart. In the second, Wambaugh is back at Chicago Hope Hospital causing trouble for the doctors. Lauren Holly later joined the cast of Chicago Hope as Dr. Jeremy Hanlon and Tom Skerritt appeared in a different role as a guest star.
Also, as the story goes David E. Kelley and Chris Carter (creator of The X-Files) were talking in a parking lot on the Fox lot one day and thought it might be interesting to have Mulder and Scully visit Rome, Wisconsin for an X-Files episode. Originally, the two shows would be shot with different viewpoints one from the X-Files perspective and the other from Picket Fences. The official approval was never given by Fox and CBS, so the only remnants we have of this effort are the X-Files episode "Red Museum" and the Picket Fences episode "Away in the Manger" having similar plotlines involving cows. While every reference to Picket Fences has been purged from the X-Files episode, there still are some small winks left in the Picket Fences episode referring to the happenings at the X-Files and some minor characters there.
| Show | Episode # | Episode Name | Airdate |
|---|
| Picket Fences | 3-7 | "Rebels With Causes" | November 11, 1994 | | Chicago Hope | 1-13 | "Small Sacrifices" | January 23, 1995 |
DVD release
20th Century Fox released the first season of Picket Fences on DVD.
| DVD Name | Ep# | Region 1 | Additional Information |
|---|
| The Complete First Season | 22 | June 19, 2007 |
- All Roads Lead To Rome featurette
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Awards
Picket Fences 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 is popular as reruns in western Europe, especially in France, Germany, and Denmark. It was 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, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. Generally these were simple exteriors of buildings such as City Hall (side entrance to Monrovia City Hall), the Hogan 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.
- 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 one episode in the final season, for a total of 87 of the 88 episodes produced.
- 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.
- In the sixth episode of the first season, "Remembering Rosemary", Kimberly states that she is going to a party at Jimmy Berluti's house, the name of a main character from The Practice. It is assumed that Berluti is the name of a friend of Kelley's.
- Michelle Pfeiffer (Kelley's wife) appears uncredited in the episode, "Freezer Burn." Producers sneaked the footage in to surprise Kelley, and CBS wasn't aware until the episode was broadcast.
- Finkel and Walston attempted to reunite in 1996 (after the series' cancellation) in the half-hour sitcom, "Mixed Nuts" which NBC bought after CBS passed. The pilot did not go to series.
See also
External links
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