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.
The Writing Wombat 