Today, we look at how Diff’rent Strokes spun off its Mrs. Garrett character for The Facts of Life very quickly.
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! This is a special week’s worth of Facts of Life-related backdoor pilots!
CONCEPT: Garrett’s Girls – Philip Drummond’s live-in maid, Mrs. Garrett (Charlotte Rae) becomes the housemother at a school for girls
SERIES IT AIRED ON Diff’rent Strokes
As I noted in the recent post about Matlock spinning off Jake and the Fatman in just its fifth episode, TV icon Fred Silverman (a producer on Matlock who previously head up a few different networks) was ALL about spinoffs. When he took over NBC in the late 1970s, the network had few successes, so when a new sitcom, Diff’rent Strokes, about a rich man, Mr. 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 1978-79 TV season, Silverman 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.
In the finale of Season 1 of Diff’rent Strokes, “The Girls School,” Mr. Drummond’s wise-cracking maid, Mrs. Garrett (Charlotte Rae), got a job working at the private girls school that Drummond’s daughter, Kimberly (Dana Plato), attended as a housemother for the girls (interestingly enough, despite attending the school, Kimberly was never intended to join the cast of the spinoff). Note that the school was called EastLAKE in this episode.
DID THE PILOT GO TO SERIES? Yes, with the show renamed from Garrett’s Girls to The Facts of Life, and the school renamed EastLAND. The show struggled at first, but a clever decision to shrink the cast and focus on just four girls beginning in Season 2 helped turn things around and make The Facts of Life a bigger hit than Diff’rent Strokes ever was.
SHOULD IT HAVE? Sure, the concept was a fine one, and Rae was a strong actor.
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!).
Like a lot people, I only started watching The Facts of Life after it was revamped to just focus on four of the girls, and I believe I never saw Diff’rent Strokes during the Edna Garrett season, so I honestly didn’t realize TFOL was a spinoff until years later!
I wonder why they made the Eastlake/Eastland switch. It’s such an arbitrary change. Did they find a real school by that name, maybe?