You take the bad, you take the worse, you take 'em both and that's all you get. Accept the facts.

Cloris Leachman died a couple days ago.  Although she's probably best known as Frau Blücher [neiighhhh] and other than that as Phyllis on Mary Tyler Moore and her own spin-off, I knew her best as her replacement for Charlotte Rae on The Facts of Life.  In hindsight, there wasn't really any point to that but then, the girls were adults by then and why were they still together in the first place?

Anyway, I started off looking up a few of Rae's best-known classic scenes from movies and other tv shows - no point watching Leachman, amiright? - and obviously I was going to get back to that tv show.  I liked it as a kid but there's still the standard excuse, I was just a kid.  I'm still not sure why on earth I would have any desire to actually see any of it again.

But I looked up a few clips on youtube.  The theme song is just magnificent, so that's definitely a plus.  Most of the clips on youtube are short but I could not stop myself from enjoying them.  Then I discovered I actually have some full episodes saved in my computer files.  Where the hell did I get them?  What was I doing in late-July 2014 where I had access to them?  But I have eleven episodes from across the series run.  And why did I choose these episodes?

And yet it works.  The clips were certainly entertaining and I generally recognized most of them.  If anybody used to watch the series and remembers anything from it, it's probably the 'paint fight' and I definitely enjoyed that.  They were acting in the sense that they were following a script but otherwise it's just girls being girls and it was fun.  Then Mrs. G. comes in and catches them...

So far I've only watched one episode, it was an hour-long season finally that was mostly flashbacks to earlier episodes, but I couldn't resist.  The humor is as good as I've seen from tv in the last few decades anyway and the characters had decent stories.  Mrs. Garrett will generally save the day from whatever the current problem is and the stories are focused on them in school.  It's pretty simple and doesn't live up to any high hopes but little else is needed.

The first season didn't work well, there were just too many girls involved to give any of them much storytime and tv wasn't into building on large casts, particularly in sitcoms.  For the second season, they dropped most of the cast and put the rest in a situation where they basically had to be around each other.  I've always wondered why they added Jo instead of just keeping one of the previous cast like Cindy but this was clearly the right way to go.

Blair and Jo were definitely the main characters in the foursome, most episodes were about either or both of them.  Lisa Whelchel was clearly the best actress of the group (not counting Charlotte Rae) and Nancy McKeon just came out as great by being different from the others.  They weren't that different in later seasons but were still based on the great characterization of the early years.

Natalie and Tootie were more supporting cast although they were certainly capable of handling mainplots or subplots regularly together or apart.  It makes the foursome work, they can't all be stars and two of them are based on fighting over the top role so the other two were what held the group together.  The straight man is always a crucial role in comedy just to give the humor something to work with and the audience isn't even giving them credit for it.  Mindy Cohn and Kim Fields certainly filled those roles.  Tootie was a little off just because she was so much younger than the others but in a few years that didn't show.

The show was produced by Embassy Television, which was founded by Norman Lear and, looking it up, from The Jeffersons to Married With Children, seems to have been responsible for a lot of shows I watched when I was younger.  I should look that up, did any other studio come close to that success?  I certainly watched a lot of television when I was younger but it wasn't like I filled up all my free time with it.

I doubt I'll watch all of the episodes I have, much less try to find any more, but it is nice to see something that's genuinely enjoyable again.  One thing I do notice was that it could go in very different directions at times.  I don't have a copy of the episode where someone is trying to sway Tootie into childporn but that's definitely something that other tv shows wouldn't have touched.  I do have - and will probably wind up watching - an episode that's just weird fantasy from Natalie at a truck stop.  Where did that one even come from?  I remember none of it but I've always remembered it exists.

I also have the episode with the "pillow fight" which only comes in second to the "paint fight," it's safe to assume I'll watch that too.  This is what goes on in my life.  And that's a fact...  😢