I know it was for the sake of variety in the episodes, but we would always joke about how Friday and Gannon kept getting passed around all the different departments. They couldn't fire them (a union thing), so they kept getting transferred all over the LAPD force. Loved this show.
shareIn season #4, episode #4 ("DNQ - Medical", 1969), Friday remarks to Gannon that they'd both been working the "hospital detail" for "three years - thirty-six months". That's three years in a windowless cubby-hole of an office located just off a hospital emergency room. As usual, the episodes just before and after "DNQ - Medical" were completely different types of assignments. If each assignment were an average of three years' duration, and their careers lasted about thirty years, that would allow for only about ten episodes to cover all their assignments once-each. No criticism is implied, though; breaking it up into weekly assignment-changes kept the show fresh and entertaining. I was just surprised that they let it slip that the one assignment - and a niche "hospital detail" one, at that - had lasted at least three years (and presumably more).
shareIn season #1, episode #12 ("The Hit-and-Run Driver"), Friday and Gannon handle a fatal drunk-driving case involving a repeat offender. In the following scene, Friday narrates that it's now five months later, and - still in the same unit assignment - they respond to yet another fatal drunk-driving case involving the same defendant. Always amusing to spot them specifying the length of a long-term assignment, when in every week's episode they're supposedly somewhere new.
shareOf course it's funny but the main reason was to show the watching public the workings of the LAPD as a whole. So every episode (which by the way did come from actual LAPD case files) had to have Friday and Gannon working in a different department. They were always the same characters (in a way) but of different departments. I can remember some episodes where they would talk about how long they had been working a specific department.
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I noticed that in the 60s. Friday and Gannon kept getting bounced around from one department to another from week to week. And they were equally adept at working all if them and were authorities on every aspect of them too. The best episodes were in narcotics and homicide. That's were Friday would really rip them a new one.
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Just as Reed and Malloy would work a different LA district every episode. One week they would be in Van Nuys and the next they would be in San Pedro. Occasionally they would have to leave the city limits and interact with LA County Sheriff`s Deputies.
Eat every carrot and pea on your plate. ~ Momshare