Taking the good and the bad (The Facts of Life 1×01 “Rough Housing”)

It is somewhere between true and false to say that my years-long War of the Worlds project is starting to wind down. True, there seems to be just about an infinite number of adaptations cropping up. Now more than ever since it’s finally fallen out of copyright in the UK. But I’ve only got a couple of episodes of the TV series left, and I’ve been dragging my heels on it for a lot of reasons, not all of which are, “Because it’s damn hard to come up with four thousand words a week about a failed ’80s adventure series.”

I’ve been mulling the question of what I’m going to tackle next for about a year or so. Heck, I’ve been conflicted about whether I’m going to have a “next big project” at all. It’s a lot of work. On the other hand, I think the discipline of actually forcing myself to produce something on a regular basis is good for me.

It would certainly be timely to start a new Knight Rider project about now, given its recent airing on Twitch. But I think I need to do something a little bit lighter. And one thing I’ve been considering was tackling a sitcom. I’ve been following a couple of fine folks on the internet who’ve been plumbing the depths of ’80s sitcoms, and I think I might be able to find something to say about that kind of thing.

So think of this as a test balloon. I don’t think this is a series I actually want to go all the way through (I mean, unless this post goes viral), but the recent passing of Charlotte Rae prompted me to look through my giant stack of DVDs I ought to get back to at some point and pull out one particular, ahem, “gem” from the days of my youth. Let’s have a look-see at the first episode of The Facts of Life…

It is August 24, 1979. I am just about two hundred days old. 1979 is a big year in other ways than just me being born. Somalia approves a new constitution. And later this week, the IRA will mount a pair of attacks, killing 18 British soldiers in the Warrenpoint ambush, and four others by bombing a fishing boat belonging to Lord Mountbatten of Burma. Next week, the space probe Pioneer 11 will visit Saturn.

Marvel wraps up the critically-acclaimed comic book Tomb of Dracula. Co-creator Marv Wolfman has crossed our path before, with his writing credit on Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future. Apocalypse Now and Monty Python’s Life of Brian are newly out in theaters. Atari releases Lunar Lander, the first arcade version of a genre that had been banging around on minicomputers for about a decade. The first graphical RPG, Temple of Apshai, is released for the TRS-80 and Commodore PET.

Recently out on vinyl are Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall and Bette Middler’s soundtrack to The Rose, a film sort of loosely based on the life of Janis Joplin that will come out this November. The title track would become one of Middler’s highest-rated singles. She holds the third spot on the Billboard Hot 100 this week with “The Main Event” off of that album. Number one, however, goes to The Knack’s “My Sharona”, the first time a rock song has taken the top spot from the combination of disco and ballads that have dominated the charts for the past year. Also among top ten this week are the Charlie Daniels Band with “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”, ELO with “Don’t Bring Me Down” and Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls”.

1979 is a pretty interesting year for television, giving us all manner of important shows, like The Dukes of Hazzardand Benson and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and Jason of Star Command and Read All About It and The Super-Globetrotters and Knots Landing, Trapper John, MD and Hello, Larry (Two fun facts: Charlotte Rae makes a guest appearance on Hello, Larry as Edna Garrett. Also, my parents went to a test screening of Hello, Larry. My dad recalled the experience fondly, prompting me and Leah to try doing a test screening, but we ended up seeing Undercover Boss and it was terrible), but we are literally on the very first day of the fall premiere season, so there’s nothing much to actually talk about right now in the world of TV, other than the thing we’re about to talk about. Doctor Who will return next week with Destiny of the Daleks, which introduces the second Romana and includes one of my favorite lines (“Oh look, rocks!”). There’s also a bunch of interesting future-TV stars who were born this year, which either makes me feel less old, or more of a failure since I’m the same age as Mindy Kahling and what have I done with my life? (On the other hand, I am clearly having a better time of it than Ricardo Medina, future Power Ranger, who is just a couple of days older than I am and currently in jail for killing his roommate) But again, mostly not in August (Though future aquatic person Jason Momoa was born on the first). Hart to Hart debuts tomorrow, but tonight, it’s just this.

This is not, strictly speaking, the first episode; The Facts of Life was a backdoor pilot which aired as the first season finale of Diff’rent Strokes. This all seems like a kind of weird dream now, but the character of Edna Garrett originated not on the show she’s best known for, but instead on that show about the short black kid who gets adopted by the rich white guy. No, the first one. Yeah, this is a thing that happens in sitcom land from time to time. I will not bore you with the details of Diff’rent Strokes aside from pointing out that there’s an episode where the boss from WKRP in Cincinatti guest stars as a pedophile. Mrs. Garrett, housekeeper to the Drummond family, had been pressed into helping out daughter Kimberly’s exclusive upstate New York girls’ boarding school and ended the episode with an offer of a permanent position there. Which she declines in the Diff’rent Strokes episode.

The actual premiere episode proper for The Facts of Life finds Edna having accepted the position on a temporary basis. There’s been some retooling of the cast, the school has a different name, and Kimberly doesn’t seem to be a student any more. But we do get a guest appearance from the Drummond family, with Dana Plato, Conrad Bain, Gary Coleman and Todd Bridges appearing in a handful of scenes. And they knew where their bread was buttered: the Drummonds*[Technically, at this point in the series, Arnold and Willis were still using their mother’s name; they don’t change their last names to Drummond until season 7] appear during the cast role call in the opening credits. And each of them gets a full-screen credit; the actual cast has to share a split screen.

We find Mrs. Garrett helping the girls of Eastland prepare for a harvest festival. As the boys have never been to one (According to Willis, New Yorkers acknowledge the change of season by dressing the muggers more warmly), the Drummond patriarch has brought the family out to catch up with their seriously-she’s-never-coming-back housekeeper. Well, some of them, anyway. Arnold has hung back, fearful that he might encounter… girls. Yes, that will be Arnold’s running gag for his screen-time in this episode: he doesn’t like girls.

I, um. I guess that’s a thing. I’ve read about it. The whole “prepubescent boys think girls are gross,” thing. I only saw it in real life one time, and he turned out to be gay, so I’m not sure whether this is a legit thing in real life, or just a trope from fiction. In any case, it’s not really funny or anything. Actually, it’s kinda offensive. But it does give Arnold something to do in a story that otherwise doesn’t actually need him. The shame of it, I mean, other than the shame of the hackneyed cliche, is that it’s a good thematic fit for the main plot of the episode, but will anyone connect up these two parts of the plot? No they will not. Also, the main plot sucks and is even more problematic.

I’d better get that out of the way. I’ve mentioned it before: it’s my go-to example of how sitcoms of the early ’80s, even ones which were hailed as progressive in their time, have aged poorly and feature really disturbingly regressive politics. The main plot of this episode is that one of the girls insinuates that another one might be gay.

And I know you think you know which one, but you’re wrong; she’s not even in the show yet.

And this setup? It gets worse. It gets progressively worse over and over.

But anyway, if you know just a bit about The Facts of Life, you probably have a vague sense of the cast. Charlotte Rae as Mrs. Garrett, the wise matron, Kim Fields as Tootie, the sassy black girl; Nancy McKeon as Jo, the streetwise tomboy; Lisa Whelchel as Blair, the flirty rich girl, and Mindy Cohn as Natalie, the fat one. And, despite those being reductive stereotypes to the point of offense, it’s mass-market TV of the early ’80s, so you’re not exactly wrong. Except… You’re describing the cast from the second season onward (At least until season 8, when Charlotte Rae gets inexplicably written out). The first season is extraordinarily different. With the exception of Nancy McKeon, the best-known cast is all there, but only Blair and Mrs. Garrett are particularly well developed (Insert boob joke here). The first season is something of a clusterfuck of characters. In addition to the ones you’ve heard of, there’s also John Lawlor as Mr. Bradley, Eastland’s “hillariously” awkward headmaster, and Jenny O’Hara as his foil, Miss Mahoney, a teacher. She only lasts four episodes.

More importantly, there’s a whole bunch more students at this school than there will be in future seasons. Felice Schachter plays Nancy, about whom I have nothing to say because she’s only got one line in this episode. Julie Piekarski plays Sue Anne, who has more than one line but still not enough to really get a feel for the character. And, in a fact that may someday help you at bar trivia, a young Molly Ringwald plays Molly, who I think is maybe supposed to be the precocious one? Like, the main thing she does is correct Bradley from “girls” to “women”. You can probably see why they decided to prune back a bit.

The character who gets focus this week is Julie Anne Haddock’s Cindy, the tomboy. I have to credit the show a bit here: far too often, a character like this would be played by basically a supermodel wearing a baseball cap with her hair in a ponytail. Cindy does have her hair in a ponytail and wears a baseball cap. But she’s still a gangly tween girl with an athletic build and a strong jaw and even when they pretty her up for the “Holy shit she took her hair down and her glasses off and changed into something feminine and now she looks Hollywood pretty,” scene at the climax of the episode, she’s still gangly and awkward and we are spared any sort of creepy attempt to sex up a fourteen year old for the audience’s amusement.

We are quick, though, to establish her as unfeminine: on seeing Willis, she asks what he’s doing at a girls’ school, and he suggests that he might ask her the same thing. Arnold, on the other hand, is comforted by Cindy’s assurance that she doesn’t like kissing either, but instead likes sports (The two genders: kissing and sports). “You wouldn’t pull my leg, would you?” asks a nervous Arnold. “Why not? You could use a few inches.” So in case you were wondering, it takes three minutes and seventeen seconds to make a joke about Gary Coleman’s height.

Once the Drummonds depart, the fire marshall allows Bradley and Mahoney to enter so that he can fumble awkwardly a bit by accidentally insulting her.

“I’ll be depending heavily on Miss Mahoney to show me the ropes. She’s an old pro. I don’t mean she’s an old pro. I-I mean. She’s… been around. Oh, no. I don’t mean she’s been around. I mean, she’s been around the school for a long, long time. For not— not that long.”  We also get a joke that I do find genuinely funny but also uncomfortable and I am also amazed they got away with it. Made uncomfortable by all this talk about her age, Miss Mahoney tries to suggest that she’s not that much older than the students, some of whom are, “About to burgeon into womanhood.” Natalie responds, “I thought all of us were burgeons.”

Miss Mahoney and Mr. Bradley have it out when Bradley decides to relax curfew for the evening’s dance. She’s scandalized by the affront to Eastland’s longstanding and immutable rules, and he responds by refusing to back down, repeatedly extending curfew almost to midnight. I guess this was meant to be their thing? And probably they were going to hook up at some point? I don’t know. It feels misplaced. The bit would work fine in something like Are You Being Served?, but “Normal human person not played by John Houseman is scandalized by headmaster changing the curfew at a boarding school for one night,” doesn’t feel at all legit in an American TV show. It’s not a good enough way to introduce the idea of her being stodgy about tradition.

Anyway, there’s a dance and a harvest festival and so of course there’s some sort of “Harvest Queen” dealie to be awarded. This is an inter-school event for some reason, and Blair, of course, has won it for the past two years, and fully expects to win again. Molly refuses to be judged by her cleavage, soliciting chuckles from the simulated studio audience as they mock her modest bust.

Molly Ringwald was eleven when this was made. Boob joke about an eleven-year-old, folks. That’s the sort of thing you can do in a sitcom in 1979, apparently.

Bradley assumes that’s the end of it, but Sue Ellen surprises the gang by nominating Cindy, which Molly thinks will stop the competition from being a, “Total flesh parade.” I guess the joke behind Molly is something like, “She talks like a feminist, but she is a prepubescent girl, and this is funny for some reason.” I guess that framed the right way, “Child is more woke than adults,” can be a solid comedy trope. But this feels less like that and more like, “Ha ha feminists are basically like stupid children pretending they’re grown-ups.”

So here, then, is where we get to what turns out to be the big central problem with the series as a whole. You’ve certainly heard me say this before. The Facts of Life is a generally well-made show which deals mostly compassionately and often realistically with the challenges and issues that are faced by young women finding their places in the world, which tries to validate a diversity of views and life paths…

And the central underlying joke, the core of the comedy in this comedy series, is, from the outset, and remains, for the duration of the series, “Isn’t it adorable that these girls think they’re people? Look at them wearing people clothes and pretending to do people jobs and have people opinions like what girls think and feel and do actually matters.”

Mrs. Garrett is delighted that Cindy entering the competition means they’ll have a “real race”, since I guess those other schools are all a bunch of dogs. Cindy protests that she doesn’t even own a dress. Natalie offers one she’d gotten from her sister (Natalie will subsequently be an only child), since, “I grew out of it before I grew into it.”

Leah was offended by that bit. Rightly so, but keep in mind, this is 1979 and they waited eight and a half minutes to make a fat joke. Eight and a half minutes. At this point in the story, they’ve already made a short joke about Gary Coleman, two jokes about Cindy being butch, and a boob joke about Molly Ringwald. Waiting eight and a half minutes before making a fat joke at Mindy Cohn’s expense shows an admirable level of restraint, I think.

Also, Mindy Cohn isn’t exactly svelte or anything, and as the series progresses, she does put on some weight. But here in season one? “Fat” feels like a stretch. Yes, she’s not rail-thin like the pre-teens, and she’s got a fuller face than the others, but come on.

I do like Mrs. Garrett’s response, however: she grabs her own ass and says, “Happens to the best of us.” Not only does she avoid fat-shaming (in fact, none of the girls says anything about Natalie’s weight; she’s the only one who mentions it), she avoids legitimizing fat-shaming; she could’ve just as easily, say, asserted that Natalie wasn’t fat, thus implicitly conveying, “Oh, yes, fat people should be shamed, but you? You’re not one of those disgusting fattos.”

Y’know, like I did two paragraphs ago. I feel like an asshole now. In fact, the only reason I’m leaving these two paragraphs in is because it’s going to be relevant later for contrast.

The girls retreat upstairs to teach Cindy some dance moves using Nancy’s new Donna Summer album. Yep. Still the seventies. Cindy gives Sue Ellen a kinda awkwardly forceful hug as she leaves, and Blair reacts bizarrely, calling Cindy, “strange” for “all this touching and hugging girls.”

Well shit. This really is going to be our plot, isn’t it? You were hoping I was having you on. I was hoping I was having you on. If you were thinking, “My, how progressive of a show set in 1979 to introduce a gay teen character, even if that is a super clunky way to introduce it,” then I have some bad news for you, you poor naive fool. Because, no, Cindy isn’t gay. Of course Cindy isn’t gay. It’s 1979 and she’s a teenage girl in an American sitcom. As we speak, back on August 24, 1979, there are Christian groups sharpening their pitchforks and lighting their torches to go storm Brandon Tartikoff’s house for daring to suggest that lesbians even existed in a public forum. And Tartikoff wouldn’t even become president of NBC until 1980, I just used him because I think his name more fun to say than Fred Silverman.

No. Cindy isn’t gay. She’s just a tomboy. And that’s fine. Of course it’s fine. It’s fine to acknowledge that there’s several billion perfectly valid ways to be a girl or a woman, and that liking sports doesn’t make a girl gay and that physical affection isn’t always sexual. Those would all be fine things. But those being fine things — and more to the point, those being fine things to have a sitcom plot tell us — is predicated on the assumption that it would also be okay for her to be gay. That is, the not-horrible version of this plot is the version where we — or, at least, the original 1979 audience — live in a world where a teenage girl who isn’t good at the overt performance of femininity and is into sports might feel ostracized and outcast for being straight.

But we don’t live in that world, and neither did the 1979 audience. No. Cindy being gay was never a real option given the rules of 1979 television. This is where we come back to those paragraphs I was embarrassed about. They can’t say, “It’s okay that you’re gay.” They can’t even say, “It’s okay if you’re gay.” Someday, we’ll reach a point where a sitcom like this might be able to say, “It would be okay if you were gay, but it’s going to turn out that you’re not and we will all breathe a sigh of relief and feel good about how progressive we all are, especially when we don’t have to do the hard work of following through on any of that,” but that’s still over a decade off.

No, what they have to say is the thing they didn’t say when it was about Natalie being fat: “Oh, no, not you. You are a good person, and obviously not one of those evil disgusting monsters who deserve our scorn and derision.” There it is, the double-barreled middle finger to any young woman or young man back in 1979 who maybe was frightened or confused about the fact that their interests weren’t tracking with their peers in certain areas.

After a brief interlude with Gary Coleman dressed up like the littlest farmer boy and diving out a second-floor window to avoid being found “adorable”, Mrs. Garrett receives the news that Cindy’s dropping out of the Harvest Queen race and responds by bringing her a muffin and a glass of milk. And when Cindy explains her concern, that with her preference for pants and baseball over dresses and boys, that she might be “not normal”, Mrs Garrett dismisses her concerns by saying she’s just a late bloomer and will certainly start jonesing for the D eventually.

(She does it more artfully than that, with a metaphor about a clock, but still, the gist of it is very much, “You’re not gay, you just haven’t met the right man yet.”)

Just about the only redeeming thing about the speech she gives her is that, in attempting to convince Cindy that her interest in athletics doesn’t make her gay, the first example Edna tosses out to show femininity and athleticism aren’t mutually exclusive is… Billie Jean King. I would like to think that this is the narrative fighting back against the sugar-coated homophobia, but… It’s not. It’s just not. They looked at the world champion tennis player married to that paragon of masculinity, Larry King, and thought, “Yes, see, surely she is a shining example of good, traditional heterosexual family values,” and the only one having a laugh is history.

Cindy is eventually comforted with the promise that she’ll eventually start longing for the touch of a man and that Blair is just being a bitch about hugging, and agrees to put on a dress and go to the ball. But to restore order the rest of the way, a guilty party must still be punished, so Edna has something else up her sleeve.

Word of Cindy’s plans to drop out of the competition has made it back to Mr. Bradley, who stops by, after suggesting Blair add another button to her dress so she can button it, to have a “man to man” talk with her, so he can fumble awkwardly for another scene before departing when Mrs. Garrett tells him he’s not needed. Once he’s out of the room, Mrs. Garrett fawns over Blair’s slinky dress, suggesting she could, ahem, “Have any man you wanted… And I bet you have.” Blair becomes increasingly uncomfortable as, with a tone that’s not accusatory but, in a creepy way, impressed, Mrs. Garrett says that, “If you’re advertising, you must be selling,” and refuses to believe the teenage girl when she insists that, “You can ask any boy I’ve dated: I’m a tease.”

The devil of it is, on a structural level, I really like this bit. It’s not preachy. It’s not accusatory. There’s no summation where they sit down and Full House music plays and Mrs. Garrett explains the plot of the episode. She leads Blair just far enough for her to work it all out on her own. And it’s not delivered in one big anvil-to-the-head blow; Blair still pushes back on the grounds that Cindy is too un-feminine before fully grasping that her words were cruel and judgmental. I also like that Blair can’t even give a reason for why she did it; “I didn’t mean it; I just said it,” she explains. That feels very real.

But none of that makes up for the fact that our show’s mother-figure, the moral center of the show, just slut-shamed a sixteen year old in order to teach her a lesson. I mean holy fuck. That’s what we’re going for in the climax of this episode: Mrs. Garrett reassures one girl that she’s probably straight, and then slut-shames another one. Our hero!

So yeah. Blair apologizes to Cindy, and even pulls her into a hug that lingers so long and comes in so close on Cindy’s look of satisfaction that I’m getting mixed signals.

Cross-fade to the coda, which finds Mrs. Garrett putting the finishing touches on the setup for the after-party. The Drummonds turn up for one last cameo, to beg Edna to return to them. She promises them weekly care packages to tide them over for eight seasons. There’s a joke I don’t fully get, wherein Arnold has sweetened on the fair sex after one of them fed him. I mean, I get the basic idea of the joke here, that Arnold isn’t interested in girls, but is interested in food. But the joke only feels half-cooked. Like there’s no punch-line. Or rather, the punchline is, “She just waltzed me over to the barbecued chicken, and she discoed me over to the banana cream pie.” They never say who this woman was or why she wanted to feed Arnold, or what the hell or anything. It feels like they only half-tell the joke.

Like, if they’d had it turn out that Arnold’s female companion was Natalie, then the joke, “Hur-Dur, they get along because Arnold likes to eat and Natalie is fat,” would be a shitty, harmful fat joke. But it would at least be a recognizably complete joke, with a setup and punchline that derive from characters and events in the story. Instead, all we get as a follow-up is Willis saying, “And don’t forget the tango to the turkey tetrazzini,” which the laugh track finds hilarious, but I barely register it as a joke.

Cindy arrives, all dolled up and flying high. Was she crowned harvest queen? Nope. Clean sweep for Blair, who won both the crown and the affections of local hearthrob Greg Hockney. Good. Better than the cliche. When Blair enters, though, she reveals that Cindy placed a solid second. Even better, though, is that Cindy’s “time clock” has started ticking: a wink from Greg Hockney got her gave her a warm tingling in her nethers. Achievement Unlocked: Heteronormativity! Everyone’s so happy that Cindy turned out to be straight that Blair even laughs off the fact that local hearthrob Greg Hockney has been making eyes at another woman.

Fuck this episode. There’s some decent one-liners and the pacing is pretty good, and they actually do a fair job at giving us a whole fuckton of characters without having them all blend together (Except for Nancy and Sue Anne. I assume they will get characters eventually. Or not. Whatever). But none of that matters for shit compared to the fact that the moral message of this episode is, “If you’re worried you might be gay, it’s okay because you’re probably not.” You have to be willing to overlook a lot to try to appreciate sitcoms of this era. I was prepared for fat jokes. I wasn’t prepared for the moral center of this episode. And I coulda handled the slut-shaming if it were coming from one of the other girls, but to have it dished out by the character whose role is to be the moral compass? Fuck this episode.

It gets worse. I wasn’t expecting it to get worse, but it does. Because seven years later, Sue Anne, Nancy and Cindy make a guest appearance in the eighth-season episode “The Little Chill”, reuniting with their old friends.

And Cindy’s grown up to be a fashion model. That is the ultimate punchline to Cindy’s character arc. In 1979, when they ought to have said, “Y’know what? Maybe you’re gay and that is fine,” but when they didn’t, at least they said, “Y’know what? It’s entirely valid for a girl to be athletic and into sports and not into fashion and makeup and dating.” But come 1986, they’ve decided that wasn’t good enough. It’s not enough now to say, “You’re not gay; you’re just a late bloomer and one day you will be attracted to men.” They go a step farther and say, “You’re just a late bloomer. One day you will be into makeup and fashion and enormous shoulder pads.”

Fuck this show.

Vital Statistics:

• Catchphrase count: 0 (One presumes Gary Coleman was not licensed to say “Whatchoo talkin’ ’bout, Willis?” outside of his own show. Tootie will later adopt, “We are in trou-ble!”, but she’s only got two lines in this episode)
• Fat Joke Count: 1
• Short Joke Count: 1
• Boob Joke Count: 2
• Sex Joke Count: 2
• Threats of Violence: 2
• Line Count:
  • Cindy: 37
  • Blair: 35
  • Nancy: 4
  • Tootie: 5
  • Sue Anne: 4
  • Molly: 4
  • Natalie: 3