The Facts of Life
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
| The Facts of Life | |
 The Facts of Life logo (Eastland was used as a backdrop from 1979 to 1983; afterwards Edna's Edibles and Over Our Heads provided the background) |
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| Format | Sitcom |
| Run time | 30 Minutes |
| Creator | Dick Clair and Jenna McMahon |
| Starring | Charlotte Rae ('79-'86) Lisa Whelchel Kim Fields Mindy Cohn Nancy McKeon ('80-'88) Mackenzie Astin ('85-'88) Cloris Leachman ('86-'88) Sherrie Krenn ('87-'88) |
| Country | USA |
| Network | NBC |
| Original run | August 24, 1979 – May 7, 1988 |
| No. of episodes | 209 |
The Facts of Life was a sitcom which ran on the NBC network from 1979 to 1988. It was produced first by TAT Communications, then Embassy Television, followed by Embassy Communications, and finally, Columbia Pictures Television (through ELP Communications). Today, Sony Pictures Television still distributes the rights to the sitcom.
The Facts of Life was a spinoff of the sitcom Diff'rent Strokes. 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 actresses, Felice Schachter, Julie Piekarski, Julie Anne Haddock, and Molly Ringwald, were fired (although the four did make periodic appearances on the series when it still took place in Eastland Academy, and three returned in a later season for a "reunion of friends", mentioning Molly's being unable to attend), and a new actress was hired. 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 the school's 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. This phase of the show is notable for including a then-unknown George Clooney as a supporting actor.
The malt shop 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. During this time, Beverly Ann legally adopted Over Our Heads worker Andy (Mackenzie Astin), and Australian exchange student Pippa McKenna (Sherrie Krenn) attended Eastland Academy.
By the fall of 1987, the show, which had ranked in the Top 30 just two years before, now lagged behind, rarely ranking above #40 and dragged down the rest of the night's lineup as a result (which, at the time, had Top 20 hits in The Golden Girls and 227). In another attempt to raise the ratings, the show's writers created 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 in 1973, and premarital sex conflicted with her 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.
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Syndication
The Facts of Life aired in the United States on the USA Network and later on Nick at Nite and the Hallmark Channel. For the last two years, however, The Facts of Life has not aired on any nationwide cable channel.
Despite Diff'rent Strokes' huge popularity in the United Kingdom, The Facts of Life never aired on terrestrial TV there. A few series were aired on one of the UK BSB satellite channels.
Made-for-television movies related to the series
- The Facts of Life Goes to Paris - A two-hour TV movie, aired September 25, 1982, in which Mrs. Garrett and the girls travel to France. It was added to the U.S. syndication package as four half-hour shows.
- The Facts of Life Down Under - A two-hour TV movie, aired February 15, 1987, in which the characters got involved in adventures in Australia.
- The Facts of Life Reunion - A two-hour reunion aired on ABC on November 18, 2001, reuniting Rae, Whelchel, Cohn, and Fields showing what their characters had done since the series' end. McKeon did not attend, due to scheduling conflicts with her television series The Division. Although ironically enough, she was mentioned in the movie as becoming a policewoman.
Pop culture references
- On The Simpsons, in the episode Bart Gets Famous, Lisa Simpson imagines that she has cured all disease, ended war, and reunited the cast members of this show.
- On The Golden Girls, in the third season episode Strange Bedfellows, Dorothy gives a sardonic answer to an obvious question by Rose, "No, Rose, I'm upset because they haven't rerun The Facts of Life Goes to Australia."
- On Family Guy, the show has been mentioned several times:
- Peter suggests a line of Transformers based on the characters
- Peter's campaign speech in running for Quahog school board is made up off the cuff of theme song lyrics, including this one. ("You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have...my opening statement.")
- In "SuperGriffins," the family commence a statue based on the first season episode in which Blair plagiarizes the Emily Dickinson poem Beauty Crowds Me 'Til I Die.
- Peter changes into Mrs. Garrett's bosom, which talks in a Mrs. Garrett falsetto, exclaiming "Girls, girls!"
- Mrs. Garrett and Blair are also referenced several times in the dialog of different episodes.
- During her I'm the One that I Want stand-up routine, comedienne Margaret Cho mentions the show - "My hair was so feathered it looked like an ass... It was actually more feathered than Blair's on "Facts of Life".
- On the NBC sitcom Scrubs there is a group of hospital administration workers that are a barbershop quartet, The Worthless Peons (played by The Blanks), who practice singing old television and cartoon theme songs late at night. One of the first songs they perform is the "Facts of Life" theme song.
