Terry Louise Fisher, who channeled her experience as a Los Angeles prosecutor into an Emmy Award-winning television career as a writer and producer for “Cagney & Lacey,” the groundbreaking female-oriented police procedural, and a creator, with Steven Bochco, of the sleek drama “L.A. Law,” died on June 10 in Laguna Hills, Calif. She was 79.
Her death was confirmed in a social media post by Mark Zev Hochberg, a family member. He did not cite a cause.
Ms. Fisher was best known for her work on shows about cops and lawyers, and she certainly knew the terrain. Before turning her attention to the small screen, she worked as a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles for two and a half years.
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.
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?’”
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).
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 D.A.’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-dimentional 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 Mr. Bochco, who had already 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, of the yuppie subset, marked by upscale automobiles, artful coiffures and a veritable runway of tailored suits and dresses with shoulder pads.
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 like abortion, sexual harassment, capital punishment and AIDS.
“My parents told me they always could tell which scenes I wrote and which ones Bochco wrote,” Ms. Fisher 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, Mr. 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 University of California, Los Angeles, she earned a law degree from the university in 1971 and joined the district attorney’s office.
During roughly a decade of practicing law, Ms. Fisher 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.
During her mid-1980s heyday, Ms. Fisher and Ms. 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. Mr. 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.
Ms. Fisher took a solo turn in 1992, when she created the prime-time CBS soap opera “2000 Malibu Road,” about a group of friends sharing a beach house. The show, which starred Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Beals and Lisa Hartman Black, lasted only six episodes.
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.”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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