Facts of life series#
Jo’s insouciance is one of the show’s many bright spots, and her love/hate duality with the toffee-nosed Blair, an upper class socialite, provides the series with a kind of chemistry that boosts its comedic potential, opening up the storylines to all kinds of high jinks. The second season also makes a sound move in the employment of Jo, the wisecracking tough girl from the Bronx, who gives the series a much needed injection of cool, clipped humor to balance out the meekness of the other characters. Garrett still has that cloying way of the dizzy den mother fussing over the girls, but this time she is more of a concerned source of guidance rather than a complete interference. The humor is far more developed in this season. The second season fares much better in it, the show pares the principal cast down to just the four school girls along with Mrs. The first season especially suffers because there were too many cast members involved, never giving writers enough time to fully flesh each one out. For instance, marijuana, a hot topic back in the day, is now a punchline on today’s sitcoms. Many of the episodes during the first season feature the girls squabbling on matters which at the time seemed incredibly pressing, but are really more of an afterthought nowadays. The opening season gets off to a rocky start to begin with, there are too many cast members to keep track of (including a then preteen Molly Ringwald).
Facts of life full#
The Facts of Life has its full share of these lessons, much of them hammered home in the first four seasons. The common ones involve drinking, sex, dating, drugs, peer pressure, family strife, racism and bullying. The Facts of Life is typical of most ’80s sitcoms, wherein each episode is hinged on a certain moral. These four characters have since become iconic keepsakes of the ’80s, tokens of nostalgia that are inevitably brought up whenever discussing Reagan-era television. Following the first season, the series was retooled so that the large group of girls is whittled down to a primary four: Blair, Tootie, Natalie and Jo (played by Lisa Whelchel, Kim Fields, Mindy Cohn and Nancy McKeon, respectively). The program is often fondly recalled for its insanely catchy theme (co-penned by actor Alan Thicke, no less) and the five women who led the series, each possessing a distinct personality that made them every bit as memorable as it did an archetype.Īs framed in its debut, the show revolves around a large group of teenage girls in a boarding school, run by housemother and school nutritionist Mrs. Premiering in the summer of 1979, the series has many revisions and reboots that moved with the changing trends of the decade, running for nine consecutive seasons. The Facts of Life has already gone down in history as one of the longest-running sitcoms of the ‘80s that helped to define the era.
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