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Garrett is made the dietician of the school and, after a run in with the law, as a punishment, Jo and three of the girls (Lisa Whelchel’s Blair, Kim Fields’ Tootie and Mindy Cohn’s Natalie) are all forced to live in a special dorm near Mrs. Revamped Concept: The show decided to take a dramatic refocus, dropping the other adult characters, and eliminating four of the other girls (but retaining them as occasionally guest-starring spots) and add one new actor, Nancy McKeon, as a new girl at the school, Jo, a street-wise kid who clashed with her rich classmates.

The show didn’t do particularly well in the first season (Luckily, Rae had it written into her contract that she could return to Diff’rent Strokes if The Facts of Life was canceled after its first season). Yes, the show STARTED with ten cast members, which is an absurd amount of official cast members to start a sitcom with. This led to the official cast including, on top of Rae as the lead, one actor as a teacher, one actor as an administrator, and SEVEN actors as the girls in the school.

Garrett working as a housemother at a boarding school for young women, so the show would have a broad focus, showing the girls at the school, but also the teachers and administrators.
#Facts of life original cast members series
Original Concept: The initial idea for the series was to show Mrs. Garrett (Charlotte Rae), got a job working at the private girls school that Drummond’s daughter, Kimberly (Dana Plato), attended, and so The Facts of Life was born (interestingly enough, despite attending the school, Kimberly never joined the cast of the spinoff).

#Facts of life original cast members cracked
Drummond (Conrad Bain) taking in Willis (Todd Bridges) and Arnold (Gary Coleman), the two orphaned children of his maid after she passes away, cracked the Top 30 in its first season in the following TV season, NBC was quick to try to capitalize on an actual new hit series, and so before the first season even finished, the show set up a spin-off. So when a new sitcom, Diff’rent Strokes, about a rich man, Mr.
#Facts of life original cast members movie
In the 1977-78 season, it had just four shows among the Top 30 series on TV, and two of them were just broadcast TV airings of motion pictures (with the occasional TV movie or miniseries mixed in to the overall format of The Big Event and NBC Monday Night at the Movies), one of them was the debut season of a sci-fi series that wouldn’t see a third season (Project U.F.O.) and the fourth was their one remaining superstar, Michael Landon, and his Little House on the Prairie series (Landon was an NBC icon, having a hit series on NBC from 1959 through 1989)! In the late 1970s, NBC was not doing well at all. Note that I mean MAJOR revamps, not, like, M*A*S*H getting more serious as it went on or Cheers becoming more of an ensemble comedy once Shelley Long left. This is “Gonna Make a Change,” a feature where I spotlight shows that underwent major revamps during their runs to avoid cancellation. Today, we look at how The Facts of Life‘s dramatic refocusing of the series saved the series from cancellation.
