Two out of Three’s Company

· November 26, 2023 · Musings · , , , , , , , , · No Comments

The death of Suzanne Somers sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole.

Before I digress (yes, my main point is the digression), how the hell was Suzanne Somers 76 years old? The same age as Jimmy Buffett? Then again, Suzanne Somers hasn’t really done anything since Chrissy Snow, so she’s eternally stuck in 1979 in my mind, whereas I’ve seen Jimmy Buffett twice in the past decade. If the last thing he ever did was Margaritaville, maybe I’d have been equally surprised. Although not that he died of skin cancer. That’s as unsurprising as the Marlboro Man dying of lung cancer.

Although, if my math is correct, Suzanne Somers was already over thirty when the series began. How is that possible? Next thing you’re going to tell me is that Jason Priestley and Luke Perry weren’t really high schoolers in 1990.

While I’m at it, Jimmy Buffett was born on Christmas. Chrissy Snow got her name because she was born in December. It was a good thing she wasn’t born in June, or else her father would have introduced her as “Meet my daughter, Father.”

So yeah, I’m saying Jimmy Buffett was Chrissy Snow and vice versa, and you can’t convince me otherwise. Ever seen them in the same place at the same time? Didn’t think so.

But no, that’s not the rabbit’s warren I discovered beneath the surface of Suzanne Somers’s demise.

In case you couldn’t tell by my rather obscure direct quote that was probably only referenced in one episode, I’m a bit of a Three’s Company aficionado. Back in the good old days, due to the wonders of syndication, I spent most afternoons from 4:00-6:00 receiving valuable life lessons from not only the residents of a fictional Santa Monica, but a never-ending supply of sass from the likes of Alice, The Jeffersons, and Welcome Back, Kotter. 

Oh, and Happy Days and all its spinoffs. Including Mork and Mindy, which seemed a perfect trajectory from the height of Americana. Forget jumping the shark. I’m supposed to believe they’re back to juke boxes and poodle skirts one week after a coked-out alien showed up?

But of all the sitcoms I grew up with, Three’s Company always had a special place in my heart. Jack Tripper was a father figure to me. Now that I’m in my older years, my fashion style can best be described as a 21st-century Mr. Furley.

I was always much more of Furley guy than a Ropers guy, although perhaps at the age of eight, I wasn’t the best judge of deadpan humor. But it wasn’t just the slapstick. Mr. Furley seemed earnest, while Mr. Roper just seemed mean. And Mrs. Roper? Please. Who would think a horny old lady complaining about her husband is funny. The answer: everybody over the age of thirty. 

I was also more of a Terri fan than a Chrissy fan, even if I knew she was a pale comparison. After all, I ain’t writing this homage on the death of Priscilla Barnes. Hell, she’s more likely to be remembered as the three-nippled psychic from Mallrats than her Three’s Company role.

At least we can all agree that Cindy was terrible. Not really her fault. She was thrown together at the last minute when Suzanne Somers went on strike. They wanted to make the character ditzy, because that’s what the third roommate had always been, but they didn’t want her to be the same ditzy as Chrissy, so they added a klutziness to bring out more of John Ritter’s physical humor. 

It was an odd choice. After all, when they replaced the Ropers a season earlier, they go with a carbon copy. Nor even a “mostly Ropers but with one key quirk.” Instead, they went polar opposite with Don Knotts. That’s why I liked Terri, because she didn’t fit the mold. By the forward-thinking year of 1982, they realized that a blonde can be smart and sassy, too. Which allowed Janet to cut back on the snark as the characters aged into their thirties.

Years later, Cheers found a better way to replace one ditz, Coach, with another kind of ditz, Woody. Perhaps they learned from Three’s Company’s experience, because when Diane left, they went straight to Terri. Not that Kirstie Alley’s character was anywhere near Priscilla Barnes (if anything, they transitioned from a Terri to a Chrissy), just that they went for a different character type, changing the tenor of the show. If Rebecca came in to be a new “will they, won’t they” love interest for Sam, she would’ve paled in comparison. 

All these casting choices bring me back to what I found myself watching after Suzanne Somers died. 

Did you know that the show didn’t start with Jack, Janet, and Crissy? In the pilot, they were David, Jenny, and Samantha. Played by John Ritter and two random women who were decidedly not Joyce DeWitt and Suzanne Somers.

That pilot episode was what I discovered recently. And then a second pilot. Turns out the Three’s Company we came to know and love was, perhaps fittingly, the third attempt.

The first pilot episode was effectively the same episode as what would eventually become the first episode. The second pilot was the second episode. Odd that they wouldn’t just reshoot the same episode three times. As a social scientist, you gotta have a control group.

I’ll address a couple of the minor changes first. The strangest was the locations of the bedrooms. In the final series, the doors to their bedrooms are next to each other in the back corner of the apartment.  Jack’s room is on the back wall, the girls’ is on the side. As far as I’m concerned, this is the natural state of things.

In the first pilot, Jack’s room was on the same wall as the girls’ room, but downstage, past the bathroom door, such that it was off-camera for most of the episode. In fact, as I watched, I figured maybe they only had one bedroom in this iteration, or maybe they were only going to add a second door if the series got picked up. Then in the final scene, when he moves in, they walked all the way over to his bedroom door, which required a different camera angle. No way would that have worked for eight seasons of sneaking-in-and-sneaking-out farce.

In the second pilot, the two bedroom doors were moved to their final spot but, in the uncanniest of valleys, they were switched. I can’t express how much it fucked with my mind to think of Janet and Crissy (as they had updated their names to) sleeping in the back room and Jack on the left. 

Now the all-arching question: why did they swap? I understand why the first pilot’s placement didn’t work, but who, after watching the second pilot, thought, “Yeah, they’re in the right spot, but who is sleeping in which room needs to change for this show to really take off!” 

Speaking of the physical layout, the original pilot implied that the primary apartment was next door to, not upstairs from, the Ropers’ apartment. Probably more realistic considering Santa Monica geography, but it makes it much easier to understand Stanley’s grumpy gripes if the loud parties are constantly over his roof instead of a few walls away.

Thankfully, the Regal Beagle looked exactly the same as in its final iteration. I don’t know if I could’ve handled a different layout for the ultimate sleaze-bar pick-up spot. That would be like The Brady Bunch moving Alice’s room to… to… wait a second, where was Alice’s room? The doorway in the back corner of the kitchen went to the laundry.

When my tenth grade English teacher told us we could debate any topic, some of my friends and I tackled that one. Complete with visual aids. I think Rian Johnson might have been in on that debate. Maybe it’ll be a key clue in a Poker Face season two mystery. 

The main takeaway from watching both pilot iterations, however, comes down to casting, not set design. I doubt the first iteration would’ve lasted long. 

I don’t know how much of it was acting, how much of it was directing, and how much was chemistry. A lot of the online comments talked about those initial actresses missing the panache of Joyce DeWitt and Suzanne Sommers. And while there’s definitely something to that, I don’t know that it’s entirely their fault. After all, John Ritter and Norman Fell were both in all three iterations, but the magic doesn’t hit. 

Mr. Roper is a curmudgeon throughout, but he wasn’t a funny curmudgeon until the final product. In the original, Mrs. Roper was almost as curmudgeonly as her husband. The winning about never having sex anymore came off as true animosity in the original instead of the eye-rolling love in the series. 

Jack Tripper (sorry, “Dave”) was a struggling actor instead of a cooking student. Although the culmination of the episode was still him whipping up a gourmet breakfast for the girls, which convinces them to ask him to move in. Don’t know how many struggling actors are closeted gourmet chefs.

The brunette worked at the DMV instead of being a florist. Not sure how that would’ve worked going forward, because there ended up being a few episodes where they visited Janet at the florist shop. While a visit to the DMV can certainly be played for laughs once or twice, how much can you do with Janet (oops, “Jenny”) sitting at the front of a long line of disgruntled customers. Plus, maybe I’m suffering from confirmation bias, but Janet totally worked as a high-strung small business owner, not an “I don’t give a shit” government employee. Which might be why, in the pilot, it was the brunette, not the blonde, who was a bit sex-crazed. 

Not that Chrissy was sex-crazed, mind you. If anything, quite the opposite, but she was the sex symbol.  Still, I think Jenny made a comment about Dave being attractive, whereas Dave didn’t seem to notice that the girls were attractive. He was a bit more of a horndog in the second episode, but only as a plot point so Mrs. Roper could realize he wasn’t gay. 

It was obvious in watching the original pilot that there was little chemistry between the three main characters. What I wonder is how the producers knew that it wasn’t a John Ritter problem.  Is there some alternate universe where people remember Three’s Company with Jenny, Susanne, and a Dave character played by, I don’t know, John Stamos? Probably not, because I just looked him up and John Stamos was only 14 when the show premiered. But you get the point.

Regardless, the second pilot brought in Joyce DeWitt and another random blonde to play Chrissy, as all the characters had their proper names by then. Again, maybe it’s confirmation bias, but the Jack and Janet dynamic was already there. Prior to this deep dive, I never would’ve thunk it, but I now think that Joyce DeWitt was actually the lynchpin that made the show. Janet was Jack’s foil. Should’ve been more obvious considering they went through three blondes and never lost a step. I always assumed it was John Ritter that carried the show, but Three’s a Crowd, the sequel that had Jack living with his girlfriend and her father, was lousy. Guess who wasn’t in it?

Which isn’t to say Suzanne Somers wasn’t vital for the show to work. Chrissy certainly brought a certain flair to the show. She played an earnest ditz, more naive than stupid, which forced Jack and Janet into a protective roll. In the pilots, there wasn’t really a “dumb one” and a “sassy one,” they were all somewhat sassy, somewhat ditzy, and all kinds of rote. For an ensemble to work, there needs to be distinct characters. The show was already going to suffer from a serious “women are objects” vibe. It wouldn’t do any good to double-down and make them interchangeable, as well. 

One might think that this was just a pilot and the characters would’ve evolved or been fleshed out later. Or that the writing got better between the pilots and the show. Except when you see Joyce DeWitt in the second pilot, she pops. 

Of course, any discussion of how that ensemble worked has to delve into how Suzanne Somers left the show. Suzanne Somers wanted as much money as John Ritter. Not a bad goal and a fight still going on in Hollywood today. If they’re an ensemble, they ought to be paid the same. That’s the path the Friends stars would take a generation later to the tune of a million dollars an episode. 

Unfortunately, Suzanne Somers didn’t go that route. She didn’t say she and Joyce DeWitt ought to both be paid the same as John Ritter. Only her. And depending on whose account you believe, she might’ve asked for more than John Ritter, thinking she was the star, the main draw. That the show would fall apart without her. 

In one sense, she was probably right, as these initial pilots showed. But they also showed that each of the three brought their own ingredient to the roux. The version starring Denise Galik as Chrissy might not’ve been a hit. But the version that had already swapped out Norman Fell for Don Knotts didn’t really need Chrissy Snow anymore. 

What it did need was Joyce DeWitt, who Suzanne Somers (and probably a hell of a lot more of us) completely dismissed.

New Car… Licensin’?

· November 5, 2023 · Musings · , , , · No Comments

I only planned on writing two posts about my new car. One about the excruciating purchasing process, one about all the stupid bells and whistles that are allegedly for safety, but in reality are just too raise the price and add a panache of tsk-tsk. What else could there possibly be to write about? There can’t be any extra layers of bullshit, can there?

You must not be from California

You see, I have a personalized license plate. Never really seemed like something I’d do. Same teason I don’t have a tattoo. I can’t think of anything so important to me that I’d need it on my skin, or on my car, for all the world to see for the next fifty years. 

But five or six years ago, one of the California government’s eternal money grabs spoke out to me. 

Plenty of states are running specialty plates these days. Some of them raise money for cancer or whales or, I don’t know,  hemorrhoids. If you ask me, the last thing cancer needs is more money. It kills millions of us every year. Why the fuck would I buy it a big-screen t.v.?

What? The money goes to fight cancer? They should make that clearer.

Well, like me, the California government decided they didn’t want the money going to cancer, either. They wanted to keep it all for themselves. 

So they came up with fancy new California license plates. That were actually the fancy old California license plates. 

Back in ye olden days, California had colorful license plates. Then again, California used to be known for quirk and personality. Beaches and sunsets and roller blading. Now we’re just known for traffic, regulation, and feces on sidewalks.Makes sense that we’d opt for white license plates with boring blue script.

When I grew up, we had blue plates with yellow digits, reflecting our state colors (See: UCLA & Cal Berkely, plus every other Uuniversity of California). Prior to those, we had black plates with gold lettering. I remember those growing up, but they were all faded on old jalopies, most likely a truck being driven by somebody older than dirt. 

Evidently before the gold-on-black plates we had black letters on gold. Never saw those, not even the remnants. They’re listed as representing the 1950s, but, growing up in the 1980s, I associated the black plates with the 1950s. Turns out they were mostly from the 1960s, meaning cars last a lot shorter than I expected.

The reason I now know about those gold plates is because, before bringing back the old license plates, they had us vote. They were going to bring back one set of plates (for an additional fee, natch) and one set of plates only. Not sure why, because there’s already about twenty specialty plates out there, but nothing draws up interest like scarcity. And online voting. When sales wane on the winner, they’ll release the next one.

I voted for the blue plates of my youth, but unfortunately that didn’t win. The black ones of the 1960s won because if Boomers do nothing else, they vote, as is evidenced by every presidential election from 2016 through 2024. Since it was an online poll, I thought us Gen Xers had a chance, I shoulda known better. We’ll never get a Gen X president and we won’t get our fancy blue license plates.

Much like sports, once my team was out of the license plate race, I figured I’d tune out of the posteseason. But it turned out that those black plates had some exciting players on their team.

When they started showing up on cars, I was surprised at how sharp the black was. Again, when I was growing up, the only black license plates driving around were sporting twenty years of road rash and grime. More gray than black, and the “gold” digits looked closer to tooth plaque than what one might find in them thar hills. 

Unlike those decrepit remnants from 1960, these new plates sparkled like a black hole. Wait, do those sparkle? The pictures NASA has released look nothing like what sci-fi has been promising for a century.

Regardless, when I bought a deep brown car, I thought it totally needed a bright black and gold plate, so I ordered one. Only fifty bucks and maybe if California makes enough money on these plates, they’ll lower some other… ha ha, sorry, I couldn’t even pretend to finish that sentence. 

Here’s the strange thing. A personalized license plate also costs fifty bucks. Not fifty additional bucks. For the same price, you can get a specialized plate, a personalized plate, or both. Furthermore, if you bought a no-personalized black plate, you weren’t getting the random seven digits of a normal plate. Instead it was six digits that were in a weird order, such that people would think it was personalized and you’d constantly be responding to people asking, “Okay, I give up, what does HG25LZ mean?”

So I opted for a personalized plate. I realized the scam of the “same price for specialty and personalized plates” a year later. Personalized plates cost that extra fifty bucks every year, as opposed to the one time fee for the black plates. It’s like drug dealers giving you the first hit for free. Or all those alleged houses giving trick-or-treaters cocaine because the kids will totally remember which random house they got that free cocaine at when unloading hundreds of skittles packs. Then they’ll go back to that house with their one or two dollars of allowance. Do I have that right? Makes total sense.

Anyway, after I bought my new car, I wanted to transfer my personalized plates, even if black plates on a black car are so gauche. You take the plates off your old car when you’re trading it in to the dealership and hold onto them until your generic permanent plates show up in the mail. Then you take both sets of plates into the DMV (or, thankfully, AAA) and have them do the swap on their computer. 

Seems like a gargantuan waste of time when I could’ve just written my personalized plates down on one of the five hundred forms I had to sign when I bought the car and saved everyone the hassle of producing and sending out a license plate that will never be used. Then again, DMV stands for “Gargantuan Waste of Time,” so no harm, no foul. 

Besides, that would require someone at the state to actually read some of the forms I’m signing, and we all know that ain’t happening.

It took about six weeks for my permanent (temporary) plates to arrive. Since I knew I could do AAA instead of the DMV, I didn’t feel the need to take a day off work or anything. Until I showed and was informed that my vanity plates had been reported lost or stolen.

Lost or stolen? What the fuck? I’ve got them right here in my hand. They’ve been riding around in my trunk for six weeks. At no point was it lost, nor was it stolen. “I see that,” the AAA employee said.

Unfortunately, since this was now an issue of potential thievery, the glitch couldn’t get fixed at the interest group level. The polite AAA employee sentenced me to… the DMV… Sans appointment!

When I showed up, the lady at the end of the first line (because there are always multiple lines at the DMV, and you must suffer through the first line to learn which new line you get to go to the end of) asked what I was there for. “Um, these plates are reported as lost or stolen. They’re… not?”

She gave me a ticket starting with the letter G. Probably stood for “Dumbfuck.” Some of the other non-reservation people sitting around me in the next staging area had B tickets and R tickets. It’s a convenient way for nobody to have any clue how long they’re waiting. Now serving B seventy-three. How many tickets away from G thirteen is that?

When I finally made it to the front of the line, the DMV employee wasn’t completely blown away by an alleged license plate thief standing in front of him. While it wasn’t precisely the norm, he claimed it had happened a number of times, and that number was increasing. He’d had one earlier that week. So the good news was he knew what had to be done.

The bad news was that, in DMV parlance, “regular” doesn’t mean “expedited.”

At least they had a form for it.

Okay, it wasn’t a form specifically for missing plates that aren’t missing. Instead it’s a generic “statement of fact.” Unfortunately, my DMV Dude didn’t have that specific form, and when he grabbed one from the sloth next to him, it was in Spanish.

Fortunately, I wasn’t the one who had to fill it out, and he swore he knew what all the questions were asking and it could be answered in English. So then I just had to stand there and watch him fill out the form. And let me tell you, he wasn’t using shorthand. Ugh. 

Then it was on to his supervisor, who needed another twenty minutes or so to sort shit out. Fortunately they at least let me go back and sit down in those super-comfy plastic chairs that feel like they’ve been requisitioned from a local third-grade classroom. Although I had to keep going back up to confirm factoids. Like that the plates were never missing.

I never actually read what they wrote. Didn’t have to sign anything. Probably because the fifth amendment says I don’t have to acknowledge that I stole something that bqelonged to me and never left my possession. That’s what plea deals are for. 

But hey, after it was all done, I was able to leave the DMV with plates ready to put on my car! 

Not my personalized plates, mind you. I had to put the generic plates on.

The Statement of Fact, I was informed, would take somewhere from three to six weeks for the bureaucratic legal process to work its magic. That three to six weeks was the same timeframe it took to get the generic plates in the mail. Considering that my vanity plates had only showed up as missing three or four days before the generic ones came in the mail, I assume my vanity plates will be legitimized at the same time my generic ones will show up as missing. Can’t wait to explain that one to the cop who pulls me over.

This timing seems suspicious. I figure this is one of two culprits. First option is that the dealership where I traded it in finally resold it or auctioned it for scratch metal. But the timing doesn’t seem right on that. A high-volume dealership has to have that process pretty dialed in. I can’t imagine my 200,000-mile piece of shit sat on a back lot for six weeks only to finally be moved at the exact time I got my new plates.

The most likely culprit, then, is the state of California. Here’s my guess. One level of the bureaucracy believes everybody should get their new plates within a set period of time, say, six weeks, and automatically marks personalized plates that haven’t been swapped back by that time must be “missing.” Another branch of the government, the one that actually produces license plates, takes its sweet time with plenty of days off and eight-hour workdays with six hours of coffee breaks. 

Heck, throw in another department that processes the “Statement of Fact” paperwork. Maybe workers from all three departments meet up for happy hour after work (at around 2:30 pm) congratulating each other for the continuous M.C. Escher feedback loop of job security they’ve created amongst themselves. 

Normally I’d throw the DMV into this farce, but for once the epitome of government ineptitude actually carrying its weight. They knew exactly what needed to happen and got the ball rolling. At about two miles per hour. 

Does my new-found confidence in them mean I expect them to follow through and let me know when all is clear? After writing down my phone number on flimsy piece of scratch paper nowhere near the Spanish form with English writing? 

What am I, an idiot?

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