Today, we look at how how Who’s the Boss? briefly spun Mona off into her own series about owning a Midtown hotel.
This is Back Door Blues, a feature about “backdoor pilots.” Backdoor pilots are episodes of regular TV series that are intended to also work as pilots for a new series. Sometimes these pilots get picked up, but a lot of times they did not get picked up. I’ll spotlight examples of both successful and failed backdoor pilots.
December is a month of Back Door Blues!
CONCEPT: Mona – A flirty older woman tries to restore an old hotel to its former glory alongside her straightlaced brother
SERIES IT AIRED ON Who’s the Boss?
One of the standout characters on Who’s The Boss?, about a housekeeper, Tony (Tony Danza), moving in with a high-powered advertising executive, Angela (Judith Light) (but…but…he’s a MALE housekeeper! The 1980s, folks, when that was enough of a plot for a sitcom) was Mona, played by the great Katherine Helmond, who was the mother of Angela, the ad executive. She lived in a nearby apartment, and was always over at her daughter’s place. She was a vivacious older woman who loved to date. She would often try to push her daughter to hook up with Tony (heck, she flirted with Tony a bit herself).
She got one of the most unusual backdoor pilots I’ve ever seen in the penultimate episode of Season 3 of Who’s The Boss? in 1987. She goes to visit her brother, Cornelius (in a flashback dream she has to when they were kids growing up, young Mona is played by Candace Cameron. This would be about the same exact time Cameron was likely being cast in Full House).
Her brother is played by James Sikking, who was wrapping up his run on Hill Street Blues (which was in its final season at the time. Its finale aired literally THAT SAME NIGHT), who is as straightlaced as Mona is outlandish.
The hotel, though, is a dump. The main bellhop, Don (Joe Regalbuto) scams tourists for kickbacks (sending Japanese tourists on a trip through the South Bronx), the hotel’s doorman, Packard (Paul Sand) is a nut, and the head housekeeper, Tessie (Billie Bird), is ancient. The front desk worker, Kitty (Susan Walters), is the only normal one, although the junior bellhop, Eddie (Robert Petkoff) is fairly normal, too, and Mona flirts with him. Mona is shocked to learn that Cornelius has decided to be spontaneous for the first time and has not only sunken HIS savings into the hotel, but MONA’S, as well (how he had access to her money is beyond me)!
So now Mona decides that she has to move to New York to help fix the place up and make it as special as it once was (Cornelius showed her old photos). She surprises him by paying for a string quartet for the lobby, and it really DID liven up the place.
DID THE PILOT GO TO SERIES? No. However, I think this was the first example where it was ultimately the PRODUCERS who decided against it. I say this because Mona moves out the next week (the Season 3 finale), but then moves back in at the end of the episode, explaining that she and her brother just can’t get along, and she decided that if she was going to spend the rest of her life with a relative who drives her crazy, it should be her daughter. The timing therefore suggests to me that it really was squelched by the producers (who claim that was exactly what happened, and that they just decided they couldn’t live without Mona on the series) and not the network, but I could be wrong. It might be one of those “mutual” decision things.
SHOULD IT HAVE? Helmond is amazing, and the rest of the cast was fine, so I think it would have been fine. It’s basically the same premise as the Golden Girls followup series, Golden Palace (and, amusingly, sort of the same premise of the Florence spinoff that I covered the other day).
Okay, that’s it for this installment of Back Door Blues! I KNOW the rest of you have suggestions for other interesting backdoor pilots, so drop me a line at brian@popculturereferences.com (don’t suggest in the comments, as this way, it’ll be a surprise!).
