Title: Ramon
Directed by: Bill Davis
Written by: Theodore J. Flicker and Danny Arnold
Air Date: January 23, 1975
Previous: none (series premiere)
Next: Experience
Guest Starring: Chu Chu Malave, Anne Wyndham, Michael Tessier
"Ramon" is the first episode of the first season of Barney Miller.
Captain Barney Miller (Hal Linden) of the NYPD gets ready for work in a cramped New York City apartment. There are bars on the window, a brown rain is falling from the sky, and the radio broadcasts a series of horrifying stories about crime and terrorism in the city. His wife Liz (Barbara Barrie) begs him to quit police work and take the family somewhere safer, like Montana where they could buy a chicken farm. Barney, who genuinely loves being a cop, refuses.
Barney comes in to the 12th Precinct and starts work with his squad of wacky detectives: Stanley Wojciehowicz (Max Gail), Ron Harris (Ron Glass), Nick Yemana (Jack Soo), Chano Amenguale (Gregory Sierra) and Phil Fish (Abe Vigoda). They bring in a bookie who counts Yemana as one of his clients. Fish and Chano bring in Ramon, a Puerto Rican heroin addict who has been arrested for mugging. Events take a turn when Ramon grabs Fish's gun and takes the whole squad room hostage at gunpoint.
Tropes:
- The Big Rotten Apple: The series was set during the nadir of New York's 1970s depression. There are bars on the windows of Liz's apartment, the rain is brown, and the radio broadcasts a series of terrifying stories about crime and violence in the city. Liz begs Barney to leave.
- Coincidental Broadcast: The radio in Barney's apartment broadcasts a series of horrifying news reports about violence in the city. It then goes silent, until there's a lull in Barney and Liz's argument, when it erupts to life again with another report of crime in the city.
- Dom Com: One of only two episodes that show Barney's life at home. His wife is nagging him to quit police work and his son David (in his only appearance) is making Barney jittery by pointing a toy gun at him.
- Early-Installment Weirdness:
- The original idea for the series was to contrast scenes of Barney's home life with scenes of his work life. Half this episode takes place in the Miller family apartment, and this is the only time we see Barney's entire family at once (including his son, who never appears again). This idea was very quickly jettisoned, with only one more episode (Episode 1-4, "Graft") taking place in Barney's home, and almost all episodes over the course of the series taking place in the squad room only.
- Harris's Jive Turkey persona (see Jive Turkey below) would eventually go away as he became a pompous intellectual.
- Establishing Character Moment: Yemana is established as a gambling addict, but more significantly, Captain Miller is established as the Only Sane Man. Barney, faced with a desperate junkie waving a gun at him, talks down Ramon and gets him to surrender. Wojo, who showed up at the squad room door with his own gun drawn, wonders why Barney didn't just drop to the ground and let Wojo shoot Ramon.
- The Gambling Addict: One of Yemana's character quirks over the years would be a major gambling habit, as established here in the first episode, when he arrests a bookie. Said bookie is Yemana's own bookie and one of his slips says that Yemana owes him $60.
- Hostage Situation: A panicky drug addict gets ahold of a gun and takes everyone in the squad room hostage.
- Jive Turkey: Harris, before the character had been fully developed. In this episode he says "I'm a policeman, baby! I goes where I'm needed!"
- Racial Face Blindness: Barney has the squad fib to cover up Ramon's grabbing Fish's gun. Harris goes along by saying, "All Puerto Ricans look alike to me."
- Stop Being Stereotypical: Chano, himself a Puerto Rican, is enraged at Ramon the Puerto Rican drug addict and mugger. He says that every time he arrests a Puerto Rican for mugging somebody, he's embarrassed, even demonstrating Brief Accent Imitation, by claiming to want to affect a British accent during the arrest just so he's not tarred by association.
