![]() (Plato died of a drug overdose at age 34.) Diff'rent Strokes also spun off its housekeeper, Mrs. It's also, sadly, a show streaked with tragedy, emblematic of the cliche of child stars gone wrong, with stars Todd Bridges and Dana Plato both struggling with drug addiction and serving jail sentences later in life. It notably launched Gary Coleman as a hugely popular TV star, it managed to pull in high-profile guests like First Lady Nancy Reagan and boxer Muhammad Ali, and helped to popularize the very '80s concept of the very special episode. It wasn't as good a show as the ones Lear created, and in hindsight it didn't grapple with racial issues nearly enough to justify its uncomfortable premise, but it was part of a continuum of sitcoms that continued to at least touch on race as we moved through the 1980s. Diff'rent Strokes was a show about a wealthy white man who adopts a pair of Black kids after their mother dies. One of the things that made Lear's shows such landmarks is how each handled issues of race. If you squint, you can see a hint of this in Diff'rent Strokes. For another, the Lear-created shows were groundbreaking works of TV comedy, particularly when it came to how the sitcom tracked the sensibilities in a time of change. For one, unlike those earlier three shows, Diff'rent Strokes and The Facts of Life were not created by Lear himself, although they did come from his production company. ![]() ![]() With Tuesday night's installment of Live in Front of a Studio Audience - the series of live specials produced (and hosted) by Jimmy Kimmel and Norman Lear that resurrect episodes of a classic sitcoms and recasts them with present-day A-list stars - we're getting a pair of inextricably linked sitcoms from NBC's pre-Must See TV Days: Diff'rent Strokes, which ran from 1978 to 1985 on NBC (followed by a final season on ABC), and The Facts of Life, which aired on NBC from 1979 to 1988ĭiff'rent Strokes and The Facts of Life are very different beasts compared to previous Live in Front of a Studio Audience shows like All in the Family, The Jeffersons, and Good Times. ![]()
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