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Boston Globe
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Terry Louise Fisher, a creator of ‘L.A. Law,' dies at 79
She quickly grew disillusioned with a revolving-door criminal justice system that seemed to her to boil down to a jousting match between opposing lawyers, with little regard for guilt or innocence. Advertisement In a 1986 interview with The San Francisco Examiner, she recalled being handed an almost certain victory in an otherwise weak case involving a knife killing because of an oversight by the defense: 'I felt really challenged, and my adrenaline was pumping. I realized I could win this case. And I slept on it. I went, 'My God, has winning become more important than justice?'' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Her unflinching view of the system informed her tenure in television. In 1983, she began writing for 'Cagney & Lacey,' bringing depth and realism to a CBS series that shook up the traditional knuckles-and-nightsticks cop-show genre by focusing on two female New York City police detectives, Christine Cagney (Sharon Gless) and Mary Beth Lacey (Tyne Daly). Advertisement One episode that year drew directly from Ms. Fisher's days as a prosecutor, portraying a dying woman forced to submit to a searing round of questioning by the defense in a rape trial. 'It was the first case I saw at the DA's office,' she said in a 1986 interview with the Los Angeles Times. By portraying the characters not only as savvy crime fighters but also as three-dimensional humans, 'Cagney & Lacey' demonstrated what female companionship looked like, that 'women don't have to compete or be idiots,' Ms. Fisher said in a 1985 interview with The Chicago Tribune, and that it was 'OK for them to fight and still like each other. They're striving for love, work, and friendship, which everyone is striving for.' She also served as a producer on the show and received her first Emmy Award in 1985. In addition to her job as a prosecutor, Ms. Fisher put in time in the slicker end of the law field, working as an entertainment lawyer for film companies including 20th Century Fox, the studio behind 'L.A. Law,' before establishing her career in television. 'L.A. Law' represented a major opportunity: It teamed her up with Bochco, who had upended the television landscape with his provocative 1980s series 'Hill Street Blues,' known for its unvarnished look at the messy realities -- emotional and otherwise -- of a big-city police precinct. On the surface, 'L.A. Law,' with an ensemble cast that included Corbin Bernsen, Jill Eikenberry, Jimmy Smits, and Susan Dey, was the quintessence of 1980s Los Angeles sheen, marked by upscale automobiles, artful coiffures, and a veritable runway of tailored suits and dresses with shoulder pads. Advertisement But to her, style was hardly the point. The show (and Ms. Fisher) won multiple Emmys and ran for eight seasons on NBC. In her view, 'L.A. Law' was something less than a love letter to the juris doctor class -- 'I have to admit I'm not the biggest fan of lawyers,' she told the Los Angeles Times -- and more of a vehicle for pushing the prime-time envelope, tackling thorny issues including abortion, sexual harassment, capital punishment, and AIDS. 'My parents told me they always could tell which scenes I wrote and which ones Bochco wrote,' she recalled. 'They knew I had written the sensitive scenes about the AIDS patient whose lover was dying, and that Bochco had written all that smut about the 'Venus butterfly'' -- a potent, if unspecified, sexual technique that was discussed in a 1986 episode, sparking endless speculation. In fact, she said, Bochco wrote the AIDS scenes in question and 'I did all the smut.' Terry Louise Fisher was born on Feb. 21, 1946, in Chicago, the younger of two children of David and Norma Fisher. Coming of age in the 1950s, she saw 'no positive role models for women on TV except 'Lassie,'' Ms. Fisher joked in a 1987 interview with the Miami Herald. 'Men did all the interesting things, and the women waited for them at home.' After receiving a bachelor's degree from the UCLA, she earned a law degree from the university in 1971 and joined the district attorney's office. During roughly a decade of practicing law, she also published two novels: 'A Class Act' (1976), about a female screenwriter trying to carve out a Hollywood career, and 'Good Behavior' (1979), about a woman who lands in prison after an art heist with her ex-con lover. Wearied by her efforts to sell a third novel, she pivoted to writing for television. Advertisement During her mid-1980s heyday, Ms. Fisher and Bochco also teamed up on an unusually sunny cop show: 'Hooperman' (1987-89), an ABC comedy-drama starring the prince of pratfalls, John Ritter, as a wisecracking San Francisco plainclothes detective. 'I wanted to do something that hasn't been done before,' Ms. Fisher said in a 1988 interview with the Los Angeles Times. 'Just by not starting with the assumption that life is bleak and hopeless, you're bound to have a different show.' Their fertile working relationship, however, soon went off the rails. Bochco fired Ms. Fisher in 1987 following creative and financial disputes, according to the Los Angeles Times. Ms. Fisher fired back with a $50 million breach-of-contract lawsuit, which was settled out of court. The terms were not disclosed. 'It's kind of like a divorce,' she said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that year. 'You go through a bad period, then you want to remember the good things.' The two patched things up enough to collaborate as writers on the 2002 television film 'L.A. Law: The Movie.' Information about survivors was not immediately available. She tended to be philosophical about the ups and downs of the television business. 'I've always had no problem letting go with projects,' she said in a 1991 interview with the newspaper The Oregonian. 'Creating the world,' she added, 'it's a most godlike feeling. I love it. I get sort of bored once it's all in place.' This article originally appeared in Advertisement
Boston Globe
09-06-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Frank Graham Jr., nature writer who updated ‘Silent Spring,' dies at 100
He added, 'I'd visit him in Maine, where he had a little island, and we'd be eating plants, and he'd also be picking spiders out of his kayak and identifying them.' Advertisement In addition to birds and insects, Mr. Graham wrote about threats to the environment. Ed Neal, the outdoors columnist for The San Francisco Examiner, described Mr. Graham's 1966 book, 'Disaster by Default: Politics and Water Pollution,' as 'a damning indictment of what industry and indifferent government have done to the nation's waterways.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up In 1967, after the book was reviewed in Audubon, the magazine asked him to write about the progress, if any, of pesticide legislation and regulation in the United States since the publication of 'Silent Spring,' a devastating examination of the ecological effects of insecticides and pesticides including DDT. A year later, Audubon named him its field editor, a job he held until 2013. Advertisement Mr. Graham's three-part series about pesticides for the magazine persuaded Paul Brooks, Carson's editor at Houghton Mifflin, to sign him to write an update of 'Silent Spring.' The resulting Mr. Graham book, 'Since Silent Spring' (1970), described the years Carson spent researching and writing 'Silent Spring,' documented the attacks on her findings by agricultural and chemical companies and governmental interests, and chronicled the catastrophes caused by pesticides in the ensuing years. (Carson died in 1964.) Mr. Graham's book came out several months after the federal government announced steps it was taking to ban DDT, vindicating Carson's message. 'One cannot read this book and escape the fundamental point that today's environmental advocates are attempting to make,' Francis W. Sargent, a conservationist and moderate Republican who was elected governor of Massachusetts in 1970, wrote about 'Since Silent Spring' in The New York Times Book Review. 'Man's environment has become so complex and interrelated that any action that alters one aspect of the environment may have a potentially disastrous impact on man's health.' Looking back in 2012 in an Audubon article, Mr. Graham wrote that his book was one Carson 'should have written to rebut the all-out attack on her work and person.' He attributed the modest success of 'Since Silent Spring' to readers who were 'reluctant to let Carson go' and who had 'remained eager to see how her work and reputation had survived the assaults of the exploiters.' Frank Graham Jr. was born March 31, 1925, in Manhattan to Lillian (Whipp) Graham and Frank Sr., a prominent sports reporter and columnist for The New York Sun and The New York Journal-American. Frank Jr. grew up mostly in suburban New Rochelle, N.Y., where his interest in nature was sparked. Advertisement During World War II, he served in the Navy aboard the escort aircraft carrier Marcus Island as a torpedoman's mate. He saw action throughout the Pacific, fighting in the Battle of Okinawa in April 1945. After being discharged, he studied English at Columbia University and graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1950; he had worked as a copy boy at The Sun during the summers. With help from his father, Mr. Graham was hired by the Brooklyn Dodgers and promoted in 1951 to publicity director. He left the job in 1955, after the Dodgers beat the Yankees for the first time in the World Series. Mr. Graham went on to become an editor and writer at Sport magazine, where he stayed for three years, and then worked as a freelance writer for various publications, including The Saturday Evening Post, The Atlantic Monthly, Sports Illustrated, and Reader's Digest. He was also the author of 'Casey Stengel: His Half Century in Baseball' (1958), a biography of the Yankees' idiosyncratic and immensely successful manager; collaborated with Mel Allen, one of the Yankees' star broadcasters, on 'It Takes Heart' (1959), a book about heroic athletes; and wrote 'Margaret Chase Smith: Woman of Courage' (1964), about the trailblazing independent Republican US senator from Maine. In 1981, Mr. Graham wrote 'A Farewell to Heroes,' which he called a 'dual autobiography' of his father and himself. The cover photograph shows Mr. Graham as a child at Yankee Stadium -- dressed in a jacket, tie, overcoat and Lou Gehrig's Yankees cap -- standing in a dugout beside Gehrig, the Yankees' slugging first baseman, who was a friend of Frank Sr.'s and a neighbor in New Rochelle. Advertisement Mr. Graham married Ada Cogan in 1953. An author herself under the name Ada Graham, she and her husband wrote several children's books together about the natural world. She is his only immediate survivor. In 2013, Mr. Graham wrote in Audubon about the epiphany he once experienced in Central Park in New York when, using powerful new binoculars, he saw a black-and-white warbler. It was a warbler 'as I had never seen one: resplendent in its fresh nuptial plumage, every detail clear and sharp,' he wrote. 'It was a revelation. The memory of that long-ago bird has never left me; it amplifies my pleasure every time I see one of its descendants.' This article originally appeared in
