astercontrol:

Dan Shor in Cagney and Lacey

There is a lot that doesn’t age well about a police drama from the 1980’s. But Dan Shor’s adorableness is eternal.

“Lottery,” the first episode in which his character, Jonah Newman, appears.

Right away he and Cagney are fighting (this time over his casual attitude towards her desk). He comes in looking like Billy the Kid, and goes out talking about computer memory dumps like a real program.

Second episode with Newman: “The Clinic.” This time he has a very small role, just Cagney getting mad at him over an arrest he made.

Apparently the ongoing theme in this show isn’t simply “Newman is too nice to people and Cagney has no patience for it” (that’s the theme of a later episode, the first one I saw, which made me think this was all gonna be much more painful to watch.)

Rather, more generally, “Newman and Cagney are obnoxiously competitive over everything, and turns out this is… actually a pretty fun dynamic.”