The series grew out of an unsold pilot called The Life and Times of Captain Barney Miller, which aired on August 22, 1974, as part of ABC's summer anthology series Just for Laughs, with only Hal Linden and Abe Vigoda retained from that pilot's cast.

Unlike the rest of the series, the pilot was shot on film at CBS Studio Center, but when the show went to regular production the sets were moved to ABC Television Center in Hollywood and recorded on videotape instead.

The show was notorious for marathon taping sessions: creator Danny Arnold would rewrite and restage entire scenes after the studio audience left, with sessions sometimes running until 2:30 a.m. or even 6:30 a.m., which eventually led to abandoning the live audience and using only a quiet laugh track by season 4.

The jazz fusion theme, composed by Jack Elliott and Allyn Ferguson, features a distinctive bass line that studio musician Chuck Berghofer improvised on the spot when producer Dominik Hauser simply asked him to 'do something on the bass' to evoke a New York cop setting.

Abe Vigoda's character Fish became so popular that ABC spun him off into his own series, Fish, in 1977, but Vigoda's salary demands led to its cancellation in 1978 and later scuttled talks about him returning to Barney Miller as a regular.

Actress Barbara Barrie, who played Barney's wife Liz, asked to be released from the show at the start of season 2 once it became clear the focus would stay on the precinct, and her character was gradually written out over subsequent seasons before disappearing from screen entirely by 1979.

Guest star Linda Lavin's popular turn as Detective Janice Wentworth led to a recurring role, but she left after season 2 when her own pilot Alice was picked up by CBS, going on to star in that show for nine years.

Ratings jumped sharply after the fifth episode, 'The Courtesans,' when creator Danny Arnold threatened to quit rather than let network censors cut a risqué punchline; once the joke aired, the show reportedly rose from about 51st place to 21st in the ratings.

Jack Soo, who played Sgt. Nick Yemana, was diagnosed with esophageal cancer during the show's run and died on January 11, 1979, at age 61; the cast paid tribute to him in a special retrospective episode that aired May 17, 1979, ending with the cast raising their coffee cups in his memory.