Kelly Kelly: Shelley Long and Robert Hays - Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries

Kelly Kelly aired from April until June 1998 on The WB.

This comedy was set in the New Jersey suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Kelly ( Shelley Long), was a fluttery, status-conscious college professor who, while trying to keep her suicidal teaching assistant from ending it all, fell ( literally and figuratively) for the handsome fireman who was trying to rescue him. She was chairperson of the English department at an unnamed Ivy League College. Doug ( Robert Hays), was a blue-collar widower with 4 kids, all of whom considered Kelly snooty and not what they were looking for in a new mother. At the end of the premiere episode he proposed, and in the 3rd they got married. Mo ( Ashley Johnson), Doug's only daughter, was a tomboy starting to mature into a woman, and Kelly tried, in her well-meaning, meddling way, to help things along. Sean ( Will Estes), was a manipulator who spent to little time studying, and his grades suffered accordingly. The other 2 kids were Brian ( Bug Hall), age 13; and cute 6 year old Casey ( Gemini Barnett). In every episode Kelly and Doug had passionate moments inspired by inuendoes which led them to rush somewhere else to make love.

A Review from The New York Times

By ANITA GATES
Published: April 18, 1998

'Kelly Kelly'
WB, Monday night at 9

If only Diane Chambers had married Sam Malone! They might have lived happily ever after, the prissy educated woman and the practically illiterate sexist playboy, battling and passionately making up, if only in the minds of ''Cheers'' fans.

The creators of ''Kelly Kelly'' had to be thinking the same thing when they cast Shelley Long (a k a Diane) as a brainy English professor and threw her into the arms of a handsome firefighter (Robert Hays). And just in case there was any doubt about the couple's problematic differences, the writers gave Mr. Hays a firefighter father who announces in the first episode that the son has nothing in common with ''these university types.''

''Being with her,'' Dad continues, ''is going to be like watching PBS all day long.''

But that's where the similarities in the romance end. Far from being a playboy, Doug Kelly, the firefighter, is a widower with four rowdy children. He doesn't mind Kelly Novak's pedantry or pretensions, and she doesn't object to his rough edges.

Kelly is entirely too happy, in fact. On ''Cheers,'' Diane was miserable because she had to work as a barmaid despite her degrees; Kelly is the chairwoman of the English department. Diane was horrified by the gaps in Sam's knowledge; Doug hasn't revealed any so far. And come to think of it, the only signs of Kelly's academic leanings are a sentence about ''the myth of the popular hero'' and a mention of Romulus and Remus.

The only time Ms. Long's characters shows a spark of her comic gift is, oddly enough, in a catfight with an obnoxious mother who is being mean to Doug's youngest.

Kelly and Doug became engaged at the end of the sitcom's first episode. Between now and the wedding (when she becomes the repetitively named title character), the producers may want to call the ''Frasier'' writers and ask for tips.

An Article from The New York Daily News

SHELLEY LONG TACKLES A NEW SITCOM ON WB

By SCOTT WILLIAMS

Monday, April 20th 1998, 2:04AM

SHELLEY LONG has suffered for her art.

Take the clothesline tackle she gets on tonight's debut of her WB sitcom "Kelly Kelly" (WPIX/Ch. 11, 9 p.m.). As a college professor who falls for a widowed firefighter (Robert Hays), she tries to impress his four kids by playing touch football.

Whomp! Long no stunt double hits the dirt.

"The hit wasn't nearly as bad as breaking my finger before I took the hit," she told The News. "Before I actually took the hit, I caught the football over and over again, and my finger got in the way."

Long, best known as the pretentious Diane from her five-year Emmy-winning run on NBC's "Cheers," faced a different pain in the failure of her own CBS sitcom, "Good Advice." The workplace comedy ran for a month in spring 1993, was retooled and then axed again after a brief return.

"I was a little bit more involved with this show from the get-go," Long said. "We took a lot more time to make sure this was the show I wanted, and that has paid off.

"I know when to say, 'This really means a lot to me,' and when to step back and say, 'Guys, it's all yours.' That balance has really helped me."

She feels her new show won't suffer in its time slot opposite Fox' hit "Ally McBeal" because it's aimed at families, dealing with issues facing teens, parents and married couples.

"Those conflicts are at the core of our stories," Long said. "Sure, we're a bit more goofy about it, but we're not afraid to take on a subject that won't wrap itself up in 22 minutes."

A Review from The LA Times

TV Review

'Kelly Kelly' Has a Feeling of Deja Vu

April 20, 1998|HOWARD ROSENBERG

Her first name is Kelly, his last name is Kelly.

She's white-collar, he's blue-collar.

She's a little uppity, he's a regular guy.

She's an Ivy League English literature professor and sniffy Upper East Side feminist and fashion plate who is single. He's a widower male chauvinist and Sloppy Joe-eating, suburban fire chief who is so gung-ho that he installed a fire pole in the cluttered, chaotic house in Secaucus, N.J., that he shares with his four children, ages 6 to 17.

Sure, they fall head over heels. But how will these two kids ever get along?

Not that you expected something cutting-edge. But you'd think that the WB could have found something for Shelley Long and Robert Hays a little fresher than the stale "Kelly Kelly," yet another TV comedy about merging opposites who somehow manage to happily coexist.

*

This is routine sitcomdom, with Long as the plucky, sage stepmother who manages--in the first two episodes, at least--to overcome all doubts about her ability to bring order to the Kelly household and straighten out macho Doug (Hays) about the roles of women in society.

There is some occasional bright dialogue here. When Kelly doubts that she has the stuff for parenthood, Doug assures her, "You're hurt, you're confused, you're halfway there."

And indeed, by the end of the premiere, she has won over his surly, resistant 13-year-old "tomboy" daughter, Maureen (Ashley Johnson), and next week successfully resolves a conflict between ultimately pliant Doug and the 17-year-old Sean (Will Estes), who is afraid to disclose to his father that he doesn't want to be a firefighter.

There are worse sitcoms on the air than this one, but a lot that are better. Meanwhile, as her academic career recedes into the background, Kelly remains hard at work on her PhD in mommiehood.

* "Kelly Kelly" premieres at 9 tonight on WB (Channel 5). The network has rated it TV-G (suitable for all ages).

A Review from The San Francisco Chronicle

JOHN CARMAN on TELEVISION -- `Kelly Kelly' Is Simply Awful Awful

Monday, April 20, 1998

Hold on to the sides of your chair, because, boy, has The WB got a howler here. Laugh? Man, you're protoplasm.

See, Shelley Long is an English professor named Kelly Novak, and she marries a firefighter named Doug Kelly. So now she's Kelly Kelly, and that's the name of the WB show, ``Kelly Kelly.''

Go on. Take a minute to catch your breath. I'll read the paper and get back to you after the laughing beans have passed.

Better now? OK, it premieres at 9 tonight on Channel 20. And if Long shelved her last name in favor of her character's name, she could be Shelley Kelly Kelly. It's a thought.

The other Kelly is Robert Hays, beefed up from his ``Airplane'' days. He plays a widower with three sons and a daughter, not all of whom are eager to call Shelley Kelly Kelly mom.

The show is almost an exact copy of ``It Had to Be You,'' a CBS sitcom in which a widowed blue-collar carpenter (Robert Urich) with three sons married a snooty publisher (Faye Dunaway).

Red alert to The WB: ``It Had to Be You'' premiered on Sept. 19, 1993. Its final broadcast was on Oct. 15, 1993. Some said the show had exhausted all of its conceivable story lines.

There's an inkling of ``Cheers'' too, because Shelley Kelly Kelly could be an older Diane Chambers. In fact, Diane would approve. She gets to be chair of a college English department, and a happily married mom without having to ruffle herself with childbirth.

Actually, it's a problem that Long is still doing those Diane things. The face scrunch, for example, sending her nose flying in one direction while her big eyes take separate routes and her mouth comes a cropper. Quite cutesy-poo, but it should have been buried with ``Cheers.'' She's too old to disassemble so girlishly.

Similarly, Shelley Kelly Kelly joins her family-to-be for lunch one Saturday, and turns snobbish at being served a sloppy joe, which ``appears to be extremely loose meat on a roll.'' Very Dianish.

The girl in the Kelly brood, 13-year-old Maureen (Ashley Johnson), resolves at this -- point to fight her father's remarriage. This stuck-up college prof, she tells him, just doesn't fit.

And she's right. Shelley Kelly Kelly doesn't fit.

That could either make the series mildly interesting or send it to wherever The WB ships its dis cards and irregulars.

An Article from Entertainment Weekly
Published on May 1, 1998

Encore
The Long Goodbye
11 years ago ''Cheers'' bid farewell to Shelley Long -- The actress left for the movies, but never strayed too far from her TV roots

Tom Hanks did it. So did Michael Douglas. David Caruso tried it, though he wasn't quite as successful. For Shelley Long, the decision to abandon a hit TV career to try her hand at the movies was clearly a risk. But with her final episode as Diane Chambers, after five seasons, on NBC's Cheers on May 7, 1987, Long packed up her Q rating and headed for the movies.

In the early '80s, Long's film prospects seemed promising, after a role in Ron Howard's 1982 Night Shift — even as Cheers languished at the bottom of the ratings in its first season. Five years later, Long was a bona fide TV star. Cheers finished the 1986-87 season at No. 3, largely because of Diane's chemistry with Sam Malone (Ted Danson). Her flair for comedy also won her two Golden Globes and an Emmy.

But behind the scenes, she had a bad reputation, clashing with her costars, including Danson and Kelsey Grammer. ''Diane was...a pain in the butt...and I think the people of Cheers got me confused with that,'' she said in 1993. ''Maybe I did too, which convinced me it was time to let go of that persona.'' It helped that by then she'd had a hit movie, 1987's Outrageous Fortune.

Even so, her exit elicited anything but cheers from some Cheers folks. ''I guess... they felt that I abandoned them,'' Long said. Critics wondered what would happen without Diane — and even its writers and producers weren't sure (she broke off her engagement to Sam to go off and finish her novel). Director James Burrows, though, saw the shake-up as salutary. ''Shelley's leaving reenergized the bar,'' he said. Viewers agreed: In its ninth season, with replacement Kirstie Alley, Cheers was No. 1.

Nowadays, Long, 48, lives in L.A. with husband Bruce Tyson, an investment adviser, and daughter Juliana, 12. Ironically, that dearly bought movie career hasn't taken her far from TV. Of her post-Cheers projects, there have been six TV movies; the two big-screen Brady Bunch films; and one CBS sitcom, Good Advice. She's also appeared on Frasier and even on Cheers' 1993 finale, in which Sam and Diane briefly reunite. And just last week, her new sitcom, Kelly Kelly, costarring Robert Hays, premiered on the WB network. It's been a long time coming.

For more on Kelly Kelly go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Kelly_%28TV_series%29

For a Website dedicated to Will Estes go to http://www.willestes.com/

For a Website dedicated to Will Estes go to http://www.amazingwill.net/

For a Website dedicated to Ashley Johnson go to http://www.fortunecity.com/lavendar/elystan/81/welcome.html