Spin City

Spin City premiered on ABC on September 17, 1996, created by Gary David Goldberg and Bill Lawrence, who would go on to create Scrubs. Michael J. Fox played Mike Flaherty, the deputy mayor of New York, a man brilliant at political spin and hopeless at his own life, propping up Barry Bostwick's amiably inept Mayor Randall Winston. Around them: Richard Kind's cowardly press secretary Paul, Alan Ruck's lecherous chief of staff Stuart, Michael Boatman's Carter Heywood — a gay Black head of minority affairs whose elderly dog Rags kept trying to end it all — plus Connie Britton, Alexander Chaplin and Victoria Dillard. The working title had been simply Spin until ABC couldn't clear the name from the music magazine. It was one of six shows DreamWorks Television launched ahead of the studio's first films, and the only one that was a hit by the time The Peacemaker opened in 1997.

Fox had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1991, at 30, after the first symptoms appeared while he was shooting Doc Hollywood, and he kept it private until 1998. Heather Locklear joined at the start of the 1999–2000 season as campaign manager Caitlin Moore, partly to lighten his workload, and in 2000 he announced he would leave at the end of the season to spend time with his family and work for a cure; the Michael J. Fox Foundation was founded that year. The two-part farewell, "Goodbye," aired May 24, 2000, to 32.76 million viewers, with Mike taking the blame for a mob connection the mayor never knew he had. The coda sent him to Washington as an environmental lobbyist, where he met a young senator named Alex P. Keaton; Michael Gross, his Family Ties father, played Mike's therapist; Meredith Baxter had already played Mike's mother in a 1997 two-parter.

Lawrence left too, and the producers rebuilt the show around Charlie Sheen as Deputy Mayor Charlie Crawford, moving production from New York to Los Angeles. Jeffrey Katzenberg credited the Sheen–Locklear pairing with keeping it alive, and it ran two more seasons before ABC cancelled it in May 2002, after 145 episodes; Fox came back for the first three episodes of the final season to marry Mike off. Fox won the Emmy for the role in 2000 and Golden Globes in 1998, 1999 and 2000, and Sheen added a Globe of his own. In an ABC crossover, Paul even won the top prize on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.