Which network treated the show the worst?

I say the hallmark channel, their editing was the worst! I have a few episodes taped and their time runs about 19-20 minutes. They also had NO promos, NO marathons, they skipped a lot of random episodes, they skipped half of season 8, and they ran through the series only ONCE and pulled the plug after only 3 months! :mad:

I'd have to vote Hallmark channel.. I hope they have it on TVLand again soon.

Hallmark--I didn't even know FOL was on that channel until AFTER the fact! Horrible promotion!!!

Hallmark Channel, they manipulated the show by cutting out some of the most memorable scenes from the show and/or the longest scenes of the show, so they could cram in more commercials. Let's face it, this network is a living hell for sitcoms.

i voted for hallmark too but they never do anything right with almost any show that they buy the rights to

Hallmark.
I thought it was weird how they showed some of the episode then played the theme song. Plus it did not last long on that channel.

Hallmark, I was gonna try watching it but they took it off too suddenly.

Defintley Hallmark.....

Can you believe Hallmark has gotten 14 votes, and no other networks have gotten a vote yet? :lol:

Seriously, Hallmark deserves an AWARD for being such a terrible network, every show they put on gets treated like crap.

i didnt even know it was on until it was gone didnt they edit 2 minutes from each show?

no, MORE. it was at least 4-5 minutes. I have some episodes taped from that network and their episodes run about 19-20 minutes, the original episode is 24 minutes.

They completely butchered "The Four Musketeers" and "Store Games" I have nick at nite tapings of both of those aswell and they are MUCH better.

4-5 minutes from a show are a few scenes !!!well whatever channel picks it up I hope they will run each episode in its entirety.:eek2: :eek2:

I watched it like the last 2 or 3 weeks it was on Hallmark. And I saw how they skipped so many episodes in the later seasons. You can tell by their hair, LMAO......Hallmark needs to go!...."Family Ties" was also cut so bad. They didn't even air the good eps. They stopped airing the show like 2 weeks after it was on. Didn't even give the sucker a chance. UGH!...For once, Nick@Nite isn't in the worst editing ever category.

4-5 minutes from a show are a few scenes !!!well whatever channel picks it up I hope they will run each episode in its entirety.

I HIGHLY doubt any cable channel that will pick up in the future will air it in it's entirety today. Our best bet is DVDs.

Antenna TV also cut so much from each episode that I felt like I was getting "bonus" material when I watched episodes on the Pluto app.

Antenna TV also cut so much from each episode that I felt like I was getting "bonus" material when I watched episodes on the Pluto app.

That sounds bad, indeed.

Nick at Night was infamous for not showing certain banned episodes.

Nick at Night was infamous for not showing certain banned episodes.

But so was USA.

Nancy McKeon might say NBC was the worst. She claimed they got little more than chips and beer for their series wrap party.

But so was USA.

Nancy McKeon might say NBC was the worst. She claimed they got little more than chips and beer for their series wrap party.

Wow :eek: you would think they would give a long running show would get more

Wow :eek: you would think they would give a long running show would get more

You definitely would think that.

But things were so bad between Columbia/Coca-Cola and Nancy McKeon that the LA Times wrote an article:


Meanwhile, feathers have been ruffled at Columbia Pictures Television, under Chairman and Chief Executive Gary Lieberthal, who came from a background in television programming sales at Embassy. Lieberthal so alienated "Facts of Life" star Nancy McKeon last year that she took her next series to 20th Century Fox Film, according to her manager, Greg H. Sims.

"He has no clue about handling creative talent, nor does he seem to recognize their importance," Sims says. Among his complaints: a deaf ear to McKeon's suggestions in the show's ninth and final season, and a meager tribute at the end, with "wrap" party fare of "beer and chips."

Lieberthal's retort: "We were not interested in Nancy McKeon's next series because it required us hiring her manager--a price we were not prepared to pay."

The Columbia television chief cites good relations with the producers and stars of “Who’s the Boss,” the hit comedy now in its fifth season. To celebrate the show’s 100th episode, Lieberthal arranged to have Spago, the celebrity restaurant, closed on a Friday night for a private party for cast and crew.

Martin Cohan, an executive producer and co-creator of the show, notes that Lieberthal has attended every taping of “Who’s the Boss” for the past two years. And actor Tony Danza credits Lieberthal for approving costly location shoots and intervening to keep the show’s engineering crew when it faced reassignment.



Full article here (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-10-30-fi-698-story.html).

Wow :eek: you would think they would give a long running show would get more

You might, but it fits with the feeling of how the series ended. :-\

You might, but it fits with the feeling of how the series ended. :-\

Yeah definitely. FOL needed a better finale

Yeah definitely. FOL needed a better finale

But at the time, they were hoping it would be a continuation rather than a finale. Have Blair come back to Eastland and perhaps the others make a lost girls type of appearances.

You definitely would think that.

But things were so bad between Columbia/Coca-Cola and Nancy McKeon that the LA Times wrote an article:




Full article here (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-10-30-fi-698-story.html).

To make a long story short, there was this guy from Embassy for whom Nancy McKeon really didn't like, becoming a bigwig at Columbia Pictures Television. This came about after the two companies merged and Embassy ceased to exist as anything other than an in-credit copyright holding company. This all the while, occurred while ignoring Nancy's suggestions and giving preferential treatment to Who's The Boss?. So it kind of makes you wonder why the series finale in 1988 didn't get more fanfare. Or why NBC wanted Empty Nest instead of more of TFOL despite the former's disastrous backdoor pilot on The Golden Girls and the latter still winning its time slot when it went off the air.

To make a long story short, there was this guy from Embassy for whom Nancy McKeon really didn't like, becoming a bigwig at Columbia Pictures Television. This came about after the two companies merged and Embassy ceased to exist as anything other than an in-credit copyright holding company. This all the while, occurred while ignoring Nancy's suggestions and giving preferential treatment to Who's The Boss?. So it kind of makes you wonder why the series finale in 1988 didn't get more fanfare. Or why NBC wanted Empty Nest instead of more of TFOL despite the former's disastrous backdoor pilot on The Golden Girls and the latter still winning its time slot when it went off the air.

It wasn't just Nancy McKeon whose feathers were ruffled; Gary Lieberthal's career at Columbia was very short-lived, and after making millions per year, he announced he was resigning in 1992 (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-01-14-fi-351-story.html):


Gary Lieberthal, the high-profile chairman of Columbia Pictures’ television division, said Monday that he is resigning only 15 months after signing a new three-year contract.
Lieberthal, 46, will leave at the end of Columbia’s fiscal year next month. Columbia Pictures TV produces the hit network shows “Who’s The Boss,” “Married with Children” and “Designing Women.”

The Sony unit is one of the biggest players in television. Reruns of “Who’s The Boss” and “Married with Children” have generated hundreds of millions of dollars in sales the past eight years.

But at the same time that Columbia was earning record syndication fees, Lieberthal embarked on one of the biggest spending sprees in television, doling out handsome fees to top writers and producers whose shows, he believed, would sell to the networks.
The strategy has had limited success. None of the big-ticket writers whom Lieberthal signed has brought forth a hit that will generate significant syndication revenue in the future. In fact, some of the deals are quietly expiring and not being renewed.

In addition, last year Lieberthal played the unusual marketing gambit of giving away reruns of “Designing Women” to local stations in exchange for holding back commercial time in the show that the studio will sell itself. That decision could turn out to be a costly one if the reruns do not perform well in the ratings.

Lieberthal said the decision to “retire” was his own.

“I feel I’ve done it all,” he said. Sony Pictures Entertainment did not announce a successor.


Lieberthal's tenure at Columbia was rocked with scandal and stupid incidents, (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-10-14-fi-3724-story.html) including desks he didn't pay for, and leatherbound episodes of Who's the Boss:


Taking credit for Columbia’s strategy is Gary Lieberthal, 44, a hyperactive, jauntily self-confident executive who has survived several management regimes at Columbia, which was once owned by Coca-Cola Co. and now by Sony Corp. In love with the glamour of show business, he has all 116 episodes of “Silver Spoons” and 120 episodes of “Who’s the Boss” bound in leather in the living room of his Holmby Hills home.

Perhaps no other television executive stirs up as much rancor as Lieberthal.

Acknowledged as an exceptional salesman and one of the savviest marketers in the hustle-a-minute syndication business, colleagues nonetheless were surprised when Coca-Cola put him in charge of Columbia’s entire TV division despite having no experience on the “creative side.”

Coca-Cola executives had even been set to fire Lieberthal shortly after they took over Embassy Communications, where he then headed the syndication sales division. But in a daylong meeting with Coca-Cola President Donald R. Keough, according to former executives, Lieberthal changed his bosses’ minds and persuaded them that he was indispensable to Embassy’s profit machine.

Shortly thereafter, Lieberthal ordered that all Embassy corporate logos include the phrase “a Coca-Cola company.” During a 1986 convention of broadcasters and syndicators in New Orleans, Lieberthal had thousands of cans of Coke sent to all the hotel rooms.

“He knew who the new owners were,” says Charles Larson, president of distribution at Republic Pictures and part of the tight clique of syndication executives prominent in that obscure corner of the TV business. “It was a brilliant corporate promotion. He’s very astute politically.”

Lieberthal has made a small fortune in a relatively short time. In a business known for its generous paychecks, Lieberthal’s is one of the biggest, earning him well over $1 million annually. He earned about $7 million from stock options and stock grants after Sony bought Columbia, and his bonus for selling “Who’s the Boss” exceeded $10 million.
But Lieberthal’s habit of spending money raised eyebrows among his former bosses at Coca-Cola. One executive remembers getting a phone call from the head of facilities at the Columbia lot in Burbank, saying that Lieberthal had just bought his third $35,000 desk--the furniture store had called and complained that he hadn’t returned the other two. The cost was deducted from his paycheck. (Lieberthal denies the desk story and says he has “only had two desks in my career.” His present one “is a fake. If it cost $2,500, I’d be surprised.”)

“There are tough negotiators,” says Kim LeMasters, former president of CBS Entertainment and now an independent producer. “Then there are night-of-the-living-dead negotiators. Gary falls into the latter category.”

LeMasters and other CBS executives still have bitter memories of Columbia’s renewal negotiations on the daytime soap opera “The Young and the Restless.” The series was costing CBS $350,000 a week, and ABC had offered to more than double the amount to $800,000. Usually the matter is routinely handled by business affairs executives for the network and studio, and left at that.

But Columbia, thinking that it had the upper hand because of the ABC bid, hired an outside negotiator, Ken Ziffren, one of the premier entertainment lawyers in Hollywood with a blue chip client list. CBS felt that it had no choice but to renew on Columbia’s terms.

“It marked a dramatic change in the way they did business and caused a considerable amount of nastiness,” recalls Jay Kriegel, senior vice president at CBS Inc.

Lieberthal says the decision to hire Ziffren was Victor Kaufman’s, then president of Columbia Pictures, who left the company after Sony bought it. Lieberthal says he was just following orders. But CBS executives remember dealing only with Lieberthal and saw him as an uncompromising negotiator, someone who refused to leave anything on the table.

Says William Morris’ Jerry Katzman: “He will push you to the wall, but if you push him back, you can maybe deal with him.”

Lieberthal acknowledges that he can rile his competitors and colleagues but doesn’t apologize. “People say of me I may be difficult to deal with. I’m a very tough negotiator. But I think what’s at stake in this business is substantial.”

After the desk incident, the crazy report of the leatherbound Who's the Boss episodes, faltering sales, the brouhaha with Nancy McKeon, etc., it's said that Lieberthal was pushed out.

TOr why NBC wanted Empty Nest instead of more of TFOL despite the former's disastrous backdoor pilot on The Golden Girls and the latter still winning its time slot when it went off the air.

People harshly criticize that GG episode called "Empty Nests," but the Golden Girls actually have some hilarious lines over at the Westons' house.

I guess they had faith in the retooling of it for a series. I'm glad they did, because I love the first several seasons of "Empty Nest."

People harshly criticize that GG episode called "Empty Nests," but the Golden Girls actually have some hilarious lines over at the Westons' house.

I guess they had faith in the retooling of it for a series. I'm glad they did, because I love the first several seasons of "Empty Nest."

At that time, The Facts of Life was an aging show while Empty Nest became a big hit. Empty Nest was a Susan Harris show and brought back Burt and Elaine from Soap and recast them as father and daughter (instead of daughter in law) with different names.

At that time, The Facts of Life was an aging show while Empty Nest became a big hit. Empty Nest was a Susan Harris show and brought back Burt and Elaine from Soap and recast them as father and daughter (instead of daughter in law) with different names.

Yup, and not just Susan Harris, it was a whole Witt-Thomas-Harris production, like The Golden Girls and Benson and Soap.

I just heard that Facts of Life will be on a channel called Great American County in April. It's a network started by a Bible thumper who left the Hallmark Channel. I imagine that they will not show or broadcast some shows or scenes.

I just heard that Facts of Life will be on a channel called Great American County in April. It's a network started by a Bible thumper who left the Hallmark Channel. I imagine that they will not show or broadcast some shows or scenes.

Looks like they have Fuller House (https://www.gacfamily.com/). If they show FH, they should be able to show even the controversial FOL episodes.

Looks like they have Fuller House (https://www.gacfamily.com/). If they show FH, they should be able to show even the controversial FOL episodes.

Wow that’s awesome