While “The Facts of Life” has a beloved following and was considered a staple of ’80s TV, the “Diff’rent Strokes” spin-off debuted 47 years ago to negative reviews and poor Nielsen TV ratings. As a result, NBC retooled the show extensively after Season 1. Four of the original cast members were fired, including Julie Anne Haddock, Julie Piekarski, Felice Schachter and a very young Molly Ringwald.
“Then they changed their minds and then fired me, which was kind of hard as a 12 year old girl,” she told People in 2019. “What they said is, they wanted something closer to Lisa Whelchel, who played Blair, they wanted something closer to her age and I was too young at the time. I was a little bit of a different generation.”
After the dust settled, the main cast members of “Facts of Life” Season 2 were Charlotte Rae as house mom Edna Garrett, Lisa Whelchel as Blair, Kim Fields as Dorothy ‘Tootie’ Ramsey, and Mindy Cohn as Natalie Green, while Nancy McKeon joined the cast as infamous bad girl Jo.
Despite being centered on girlhood, there were no women in the writers’ room until Season 2
Hindsight is 20/20, but it doesn’t seem surprising that “Facts of Life” struggled in Season 1 when you learn that the writers’ room had no women in it for the first four episodes. The show eventually hired Sally Sussman Morina, who talked about bringing her experiences as a young woman to the writers’ room in a “Facts of Life” oral history compiled by Entertainment Weekly.
“I definitely brought some authenticity to the show that hadn’t been there, particularly during the first season, if only because I was female,” said Morina. “I mean, it happened to be a show that I could really sink my teeth into, which was good, but they needed my help, because the writers at the time were all men. They were also all older. I was closer to Tootie’s age than I was to the writers.” The series went on to add more women writers throughout the 80s, so perhaps its thanks to Morina and them that the show managed to bounce back from its initial fumble.
Hope for a “Facts of Life” reboot might be gone based on some behind-the-scenes drama, but fans of the series can still stream the original series on Tubi on The Roku Channel.