‘Cagney & Lacey’ On New Case

Tyne Daly launches right in. She talks fast, direct, no nonsense. It’s 9 a.m. and she’s on the phone to provide a few booster shots for “Cagney & Lacey: Together Again,” a new two-hour movie based on the successful 1980s detective series in which she starred with Sharon Gless.

This is the second of two “Cagney & Lacey” movies filmed in the past year. The first, dubbed “The Return,” aired Nov. 6 on CBS winning its time slot and registering sixth in the week’s programming. “Together Again” airs Tuesday at 9.

Daly, 48, says resurrecting Mary Beth Lacey, a role which won her four Emmys, wasn’t too tough an assignment. “It’s the role I’ve played the longest really, because even 600 performances of ‘Gypsy’ only add up to two years,” she says, alluding to her stint on Broadway, which won her the Best Actress in a Musical Tony in 1990. After all, she’s had to dig up Lacey before, both during “Cagney & Lacey’s” wait from pilot to original series and then during the show’s controversial cancellation at the end of the l983 season.

“I had put this character to sleep then. The set was gone, the costumes sold, and I’d felt that it was fun while it lasted but on to the next, which is how I usually feel,” says Daly. Her next role, however, turned out to be her prior. Loyal viewers, primarily women, bullied the network into bringing back the quarrelsome New York detective duo.

In “Together Again” the investigation of a murder in a homeless community sparks argument over the pressing issue of homelessness between the two female cops, who over the years have seasoned their friendship and working partnership with huge doses of healthy discord.

Besides the social issues they have to face as they explore the circumstances of the murder, the stress of their private lives stir up what Daly says the movie should have been titled - “Bad Habits.”

As for Lacey, her husband Harvey, played by John Karlen, won’t accept the discipline of exercise needed to recover from a heart attack and is afraid of having sex, which only adds to her tensions. So she takes up smoking again.

Cagney, a recovered alcoholic, is torn by the demands and suspicions of her long-distance marriage to a Washington, D.C. government appointee, played by James Naughton. For her, booze becomes a temptation.