Picket Fences

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Picket Fences was a 60-minute drama which ran from 1992 to 1996 on the CBS television network in the United States. Created by David E. Kelley, the show starred Tom Skerritt and Kathy Baker.

The series followed the lives of the residents of the small town of Rome, Wisconsin, where weird things happened, 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. He is married to the town doctor, Jill, his second wife. They attempt to bring up their three children, Kimberly (from Jimmy's first marriage), Matthew and Zachary, normally. The children were portrayed by Holly Marie Combs, Justin Shenkarow, and Adam Wylie, respectively. Lauren Holly and Costas Mandylor played impulsive and immature sheriff's deputies Max and Kenny. Fyvush Finkel played bombastic lawyer Douglas Wambaugh, who usually irritated Judge Henry Bone, played by Ray Walston. After several prosecutors came and went, Don Cheadle joined the cast as John Littleton. Kelly Connell played medical examiner Carter Pike, an incel. Other well-known actors who were in the cast included Marlee Matlin, Richard Masur, and Dabbs Greer.

Picket Fences, like many shows of its era, frequently dealt with difficult subject matter, including abortion, homosexuality (and homosexual adoption), belief in God, medical ethics, polygamy, polyamory, adolescent sexuality, cryonics, the Holocaust, shoe fetishism, masturbation, spontaneous human combustion and constitutional rights. The show's nadir of luridism was probably the episode where a gay man murdered his lover in front of Pope John Paul II. Illustrative of the subject matter is that the regular cast included a judge, two lawyers, and a coroner.

The show sometimes struggled to maintain a stable prime-time audience, and had wildly fluctuating ratings. It won fifteen Emmy Awards and one Golden Globe in its four-year run. There is a substantial following for the show, even nearly ten years later, and is popular as reruns in western Europe, especially in France, Germany, and Denmark. It is currently being rerun in French in Canada on Radio-Canada under the title Bienevenue a Rome, USA.

The creators did not know that 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 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.

Exteriors for the show were mostly shot in Monrovia, CA, a suburb of Los Angeles, CA. Generally these were simple exteriors of buildings such as City Hall (side entrance to Monrovia City Hall), the Logan 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, these included two parades where many citizens and organizations within Monrovia participated in the filming.

The producers evidently had no concept of what size Rome was or what small-town life is like; Rome was whatever size it needed to be in a particular episode and had whatever amenities big cities had. For example, even though Jill usually seemed to be the only doctor in town and had her office in an old house, whenever the town hospital was shown, it was a five-story building. Also, when characters referred to the town, they usually said "Rome, Wisconsin," which is as nonsensical as constantly referring to a family member by first and last name. (Note: Although there are plenty of places in the US, mostly ones co-named with larger cities, where it is common to refer to the town by city and state, such as Washington, Pennsylvania (referred to locally as "Washington P-A") and Pittsburg, Kansas.)

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

One of the oddest aspects of the series was the revolving door of town mayors who never seemed to last very long. Holding one of the riskiest 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 5000 hours community service sentencing