Picket Fences: Season One

Striking out on his own after several years as a writer and co-producer of L.A. Law, David E. Kelley launched this quirky primetime drama in 1992. Set in the peaceful hamlet of Rome, WI, Picket Fences offered a unique blend of soap opera, police procedural, and florid melodrama, and while the series was clearly an ensemble effort, top billing went to Tom Skerritt, playing Rome sheriff Jimmy Brock. Kathy Baker costarred as his doctor wife Jill, with Holly Marie Combs as their teenage daughter Kimberly. Other regulars included Lauren Holly and Costas Mandylor as police officers, Fyvush Finkel as an eccentric attorney, and Ray Walston as the town's crusty but levelheaded judge. The series got off to an attention-grabbing start with the surprising onstage murder of an actor playing the Tin Man in a local stage production of The Wizard of Oz. And then things got progressively weirder: a student brought a severed hand into class for show and tell, a menopausal wife casually ran over her irritating husband with a steamroller, and a serial killer chose Rome for his new stomping grounds. Anything could happen, and usually did (the regular characters weren't immune to trouble, either—in one episode, the local priest was exposed as a foot fetishist; in another, the mayor went up in a puff of smoke, the victim of spontaneous combustion). Rather than simply entertaining his audience, Kelley seemed intent on exposing small-town America as a hotbed of prejudice, perversion, and flat-out bizarre behavior. Regardless of whether he was right, the man delivered a first-rate TV series that ran four seasons, winning critical acclaim and attracting a small but devoted following. Featuring all 22 episodes from the 1992-93 first season in a six-disc boxed set, extras include an “All Roads Lead to Rome” featurette with Kelley and cast. Highly recommended. (E. Hulse)