Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries - City: Cast Photo

City aired from January until June 1990 on CBS.

The Department Of City Services for a moderately large unnamed American City ( even the seal shown in the opening credits only referred to it as " City") was the setting for this comedy. Liz Gianni ( Valerie Harper)was the harried city manager, trying to get as much as possible out of her limited budget and off-the-wall staff. Assistant City Manager Roger Barnett ( Todd Susman), was her right hand man, an unflappable career civil servent who had seen it all. Others were Wanda ( Tyra Farrell), Liz's secretary; Lance( Sam Lloyd), the obsessive and obnoxious head of the records department; Anna-Maria ( Liz Torres), the outspoken, Cuban-born purchasing agent whose revolutionary husband was incarcarated in her homeland; Gloria ( Mary Jo Keenan), the flighty social services coordinator; and Victor ( James Lorinz), the overly enthusiastic acting chief of security. Liz's nemisis was Deputy Mayor Ken Resnick ( Stephen Lee), a pompous manipulative, petty bureaucrat who was not above using his position to try to line his pockets with " gifts" from favored contractors. A widow, Liz, also had to deal with Penny ( LuAnne Ponce), her 19 year old daughter, who had dropped out of college and returned home. Penny wanted to be treated as a " friend" not as a daughter, something Liz found difficult to accept, particularly when it came to Penny's off-beat social relationships.

The series was originally scheduled on Mondays, directly opposite NBC's The Hogan Family, which had started life in 1986 as Valerie, starring none other than Valerie Harper. Coincidentally, the scheduling setup also meant that City co-star LuAnne Ponce was appearing directly opposite her brother Danny Ponce, who played one of the kids on The Hogan Family.

A Review from The New York Times

Review/Television;
Urban Incivility: Laughing With Valerie Harper

By JOHN J. O'CONNOR
Published: February 12, 1990

Urban crises. Political corruption. Bureacratic incompetence. The homeless. What do you do when everything begins to seem utterly hopeless? Put them all into a sitcom, that's what. Or at least that's what CBS has done in ''City,'' a series that offers a laugh every 15 seconds about the horrors of ungracious living in contemporary America. The new show, created by Paul Haggis, a producer and writer who has won two Emmy Awards for ''Thirtysomething,'' can be seen at 8:30 P.M. on Mondays.

Valerie Harper stars as Liz Gianni, a manager of a Department of City Service at City Hall (precise location unspecified). Ms. Harper is returning in grand shape to the kind of breezily kooky character she parlayed into fame on ''The Mary Tyler Moore Show'' and its ''Rhoda'' spinoff. Most recently she starred in ''Valerie,'' and her involuntary departure brought a suit against NBC that was settled out of court, reportedly to the considerable financial benefit of the actress. ''Valerie'' became ''The Hogan Family'' and now runs directly opposite ''City.'' Television is a wondrous business.

Liz operates on two levels. She's the single, fretting, overprotective mother of 19-year-old Penny (LuAnne Ponce, sister of Danny Ponce, one of the teen-agers - would you believe it? - on ''The Hogan Family''). The frantic mother-daughter motif runs through all episodes. Then Liz is the harried office manager, overseeing a racial-ethnic menagerie that would do any demographer proud. Ken Resnick (Stephen Lee) is the totally powerless, monumentally rotten boss. Roger Barnett (Todd Susman) is the assistant city manager who spends most of his time betting on sports and trying to sell a worn-out racehorse he owns. Anna-Maria Batista (Liz Torres) is the tough Cuban purchasing agent who pronounce ''yep'' as ''jep.''

Wanda Jenkins (Tyra Ferrell) is the black secretary who prays that her 10-year-old son won't grow up to be a low-paid classical musician like his father (''Who the hell cares about Yo-Yo Ma?'' she says. ''The man was named after a Wham-O toy''). Thrown in for extra wisecracking spice are Sam Lloyd as a creepy statistician, Mary Jo Keenan as Gloria, a rich and glamorous fluff head (think Corky in Murphy Brown), James Lorinz as a dimwitted security guard, and Rodney Ueno as the aggressive Asian mail clerk. Only the Azerbaijanis, it seems, have been overlooked.

The first episode announced that this series would be about urban America's unsung heroes, the bureaucrats: ''They may not be much, but they are all that stand between us and the politicians.'' In no time at all, Liz was telling the security guard, only half jokingly, to shoot several singers who had invaded the office with ideas for a new city theme song. ''They won't issue me a gun,'' pouted the guard, which became a running joke, except it didn't seem terribly funny in the real context of recent shootings of teen-agers by New York City police officers. That's the trouble with outrageous topical humor. It sours easily.

The character of Ken the boss, though played hilariously by Mr. Lee, is especially troublesome. When not being riduculously dishonest or obnoxiously biased (''All right, Pancho,'' he tells a distraught Hispanic janitor, ''go find a hat and dance around it''), Ken verges on being downright cruel. He appears to have overdosed on the more controversial performances of the comic Andrew Dice Clay. In tonight's third episode, which revolves around the death from freezing of a homeless man, Ken admits he has a problem. (The sardonic Roger asks, ''Not the nose-hair thing again?'') Ken would like to improve his image. Liz suggests opening the doors of City Hall to the homeless. ''Great,'' sneers Ken. ''Then I'll be loved by bums.'' He then proceeds to tell how he took away his mother's walker because she told too much to a pollster. ''Let her crawl around for a while,'' Ken says. ''She won't be so talkative.''

''City'' doesn't play favorites with its offensiveness. At one point, terribly WASP-y Gloria receives a family-tree chart indicating that her great-grandmother Muffy was Jewish. This prompts Gloria to begin greeting one and all with ''Shalom!'' and to start buying deli food. Asked why she bothered buying day-old bagels that were on sale, Gloria rolled her eyes to heaven patiently and simply murmured ''Goyim!'' Needless to say, by episode's end, Gloria learned that the chart company made a mistake and promptly returned to eating pound cake.

Perhaps with superstructures and infrastructures seemingly disintegrating before our eyes these days, the television equivalent of a minstrel show is one way of coping with unsettling realities. In this sense, ''City'' copes aggressively. Yuk, yuk, Mr. Bones.

Harried Mother, Harried Manager

CITY, produced by Paul Haggis-A. V. Productions in association with CBS Entertainment Productions and M.T.M. Enterprises; Mr. Haggis and Tony Cacciotti, executive producers. On CBS, at 8:30 P.M. on Mondays.

Liz Gianni ... Valerie Harper
Roger Barnett ... Todd Susman
Penny Gianni ... LuAnne Ponce
Wanda Jenkins ... Tyra Ferrell
Ken Resnick ... Stephen Lee
Lance Armstrong ... Sam Lloyd
Anna-Maria Batista ... Liz Torres
Gloria Elgis ... Mary Jo Keenan
Victor Sloboda ... James Lorinz

To go to Valerie Harper's Official Site go to http://www.valerieharper.com/