The Facts of Life
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The Facts of Life was a spinoff of the popular NBC sitcom Diff'rent Strokes. It ran on the NBC network from 1979 to 1988 and was produced by Embassy Television.
The spinoff focused on Charlotte Rae's character, Edna Garrett, as she became housemother to seven young girls at the Eastland Academy in Peekskill, New York.
The show was originally meant to be a summer series in 1979, but the head of programming decided to bring it back in early 1980. After a thirteen-episode run, the show was retooled extensively. Four of the girls were fired, and a new one was brought in. Now, in addition to being den mother to the girls (wealthy, spoiled Blair Warner (Lisa Whelchel), chubby, fun-loving Natalie Green (Mindy Cohn), nosy Tootie Ramsey (Kim Fields), and the new girl, street-wise Jo Polniaczek (Nancy McKeon), Mrs. Garrett also became their dietitian.
The series was given a berth on the 1980-81 American network television schedule, and the show was a constant Top 30 hit for most of the early and mid-1980s.
The show became part of NBC's much-watched Saturday night lineup in 1985, but by this time, the girls were now in their late teens and early twenties, and public interest was starting to wane. In an attempt to increase ratings, Mrs. Garrett's store, Edna's Edibles, was burned to the ground and was replaced with a pop-culture influenced malt shop that the girls ran together, called Over Our Heads. They also sold a few records, and this offshoot business was the springboard for many appearances by popular groups and singers, such as El DeBarge, Oingo Boingo, Michael Damian, and Stacey Q.
The ratings began to fall in 1986, when Charlotte Rae decided to leave the series and was replaced by Cloris Leachman, who played Mrs. Garrett's sister, Beverly Ann Stickle. This phase of the show is notable for including a then-unknown George Clooney as a supporting actor.
By the fall of 1987, the show, which had ranked in the Top 30 just two years before, now lagged behind, rarely ranking above #50 and dragged down the rest of the night's lineup (which, at the time, had Top 20 hits in The Golden Girls and 227) as a result. In another attempt to raise the ratings, the show wrote a storyline in which Natalie became the first of the girls to lose her virginity. Originally Lisa Whelchel was offered the storyline but she had become a born-again Christian and premarital sex conflicted with her newfound morals. The relative implausibility of Natalie having sex first out of all the girls, coupled with the equally implausible idea that all the women, now in their twenties, were not sexually active, contributed to the episode being a ratings dud. The show was eventually canceled in the spring of 1988, with Blair impulsively buying Eastland Academy and becoming the headmistress.
External link
- IMDb Entry for The Facts of Life (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078610/)
- The Facts of Life TV Show (http://www.crazyabouttv.com/factsoflife.html) page at Crazy About TV contains trivia, a description, cast information, and an episodes list for the series.