Every night I tune into FETV to watch 2 episodes of Barney Miller.
Every night. I watch because it’s required. (NM)
I’m into the 3rd run of the Episodes they have in their line up. (Not nearly the whole series)
The NYC skyline is the opening and closing during the theme song.
Now, I’ve just noticed recently they have cut out the Twin Towers.
They were there in the last go around.
Now they’re gone.
I have watched carefully. You can actually see where they clipped it out. The colors have changed too.
Isn’t this like making the Mona Lisa frown?
Or adding arms to Venus?
Yeah. Barney Miller is art. In my mind. I particularly liked seeing the NYC skyline with the Twin Towers.
It wrong, I tell you. It’s our history.
What about a picture of that mountain with the faces on Mt.Rushmore and they chopped out Teddy Roosevelt? The Sphinx with a nose job?
A Travesty. That’s what it is. I’m calling someone.
After 9/11, a lot of people found that seeing the Twin Towers was extremely upsetting. I was one. Some TV shows, including Law and Order, Sex and The City, and The Sopranos, opted to cut them out of the skyline. After all, there were no Twin Towers any longer. I found their absence upsetting, too.
TV programs were trying to do the right thing in a situation where there was no real precedent. I cut them a lot of slack.
I can see if the series was set for modern times. But the 70s?
23 years later after 9/11, we can’t see something so old as Barney Miller, with the original opening?
We know it was there. They showed it before. We’re just supposed to forget?
ETA…it’s very clumsily done, my 6 th grader could of done better. You can still see the bottom the buildings. Which might be more wrong, in a way
Yeah, that’s some pretty strange historical revisionism. I’m guessing the TV producers were afraid some viewers would get triggered or offended, but it’s pretty silly.
If anything, putting the Twin Towers there would add to the sense of nostalgia and comfort.
I loved Barney Miller. A friend whose dad was a cop said it was the most realistic depiction of life in a station house of any program he ever saw. I was happy when it went into syndication and we could watch reruns.
After 9/11, a decision had to be made about whether or not to continue including the World Trade Center in the skyline shots. The decision was made to cut it out. I guess some people could say, “Gee, this show ran from 1975-1982, before the Twin Towers fell and killed thousands of people,” but I think the deciding factor wasn’t when the series originally ran, but when people were watching it in reruns.
It’s a tough call. Should we cut out the towers to avoid upsetting people or leave them in so it doesn’t look like we’re erasing the past? I don’t know. As I said, I find both options painful.
You don’t understand. They’ve been showing it for a year. Now all of a sudden it’s chopped out. Not very well. Just chopped out.
I can understand moving film of the Towers being upsetting. Or film made near the time.
But this was 25 years before in a still shot from a distance of the whole NYC skyline.
Oh dear, oh dear. My dear Beck, we love you, but “could of”? Really? The likes of “could of” and “would of” and such coming from you is disheartening. You know better, and we all know that you know better. Now go to your room and think about what you’ve done. (I’m sure Bayliss will come with you for comfort).
I’m so so so sorry. I’m usually more careful. I usually say “coulda”. My intuitive tablet corrected me to that. But I changed it thinking “coulda” was silly looking. Of course it corrected to ‘could of’, not ‘could have’.
From my observation syndicated shows get butchered all of the time in order to make more time for senseless repeats of ads. Could be this is what’s going on, some junior editor decided he need to cut another half second out of the show in order to squeeze in one more Colonial Life commercial?
They’re like Schrodinger’s Towers. They tell us to “never forget” 9/11, yet we’re apparently supposed to pretend that the towers never existed in the first place.
