Tom Skerritt recalls Picket Fences, the 'best show on TV'

Tom Skerritt and the cast from Picket Fences.

Tom Skerritt was once described as the best known actor whose name is never remembered. You know that guy out of Alien, Top Gun, A River Runs Through It he was on television for a while too. I remembered him. He starred in one of my all-time favourite movies, Ice Castles, in 1978, as the father of an ice skater making her comeback after being struck blind during a training accident. I couldn't wait to ask him all about the tear jerker.

"Ice Castles?" Skerritt says from his Seattle home. "I'd forgotten about that one."

So we talk about Picket Fences instead, revisiting the town of Rome, Wisconsin, and catching up with its oddball residents. Sheriff Jimmy Brock and his deputies Max and Kenny, lawyer Douglas Wambaugh, Judge Henry Bone.

Picket Fences on DVD.

The DVD of series one and two have just been released and Skerritt is on the publicity trail, keen to reminisce about a show which won 14 Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe over its four year run from 1992 to 1996.

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"For a while there it was called the best show on television," he says.

"It's secret was the possibility of the improbable the humour, the incongruity, in the unlikelihood, for example, of having the Pope in small town America, having him be the primary witness to a murder and so he can't leave town because he was the only witness to the crime. And then having a Jewish attorney questioning him about the absoluteness of his faith.

Endearing: Tom Skerritt.

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Tom Skerritt recalls Picket Fences, the 'best show on TV'