TMC
10-03-2016, 04:59 PM
https://www.yahoo.com/tv/designing-women-at-30-a-tribute-to-the-four-man-loving-feminists-who-changed-tv-201223694.html
“It’s ironic to me that Designing Women never got an Emmy for anything except hairdressing,” creator Linda Bloodworth-Thomason says. “I think they were saying, ‘We like your hair. You need to shut your mouth.‘” That was never going to happen.
Thirty years ago, Designing Women debuted on CBS’s fall schedule and introduced TV viewers to the women of the fledgling Atlanta interior design firm Sugarbaker & Associates. There was sophisticated widow Julia Sugarbaker (Dixie Carter), nicknamed “The Terminator” for her verbal assassinations of the sexist, bigoted, and otherwise ignorant; Julia’s younger sister, Suzanne (Delta Burke), the former beauty queen who wined and dined clients as well as any rich older gentlemen who could be her next husband; Mary Jo Shively (Annie Potts), the single mother who looked at Julia as a mentor both professionally and personally and at Suzanne as a silly person (“But of course, in the South, we embrace that,” Potts says); and Mary Jo’s close friend Charlene Frazier (Jean Smart), the gullible church-going office manager from Poplar Buff, Missouri who alphabetized Suzanne’s alimony checks while waiting for her own true love to come along.
To quote Season 2’s “Dash Goff, The Writer,” they were “sweet-smelling, coy, cunning, voluptuous, voracious, delicious, pernicious, vexing and sexing, these earth sister rebel mothers, these arousers and carousers…” Or, to put it slightly less eloquently, they were smart, opinionated, man-loving feminists who defied the stereotypes of women — and Southerners — on TV.
To celebrate the show’s 30th anniversary, Yahoo TV looks back at Designing Women‘s first five seasons through interviews with Bloodworth-Thomason, Burke, Potts, and Smart. They also share fond memories of Carter, who passed away in 2010, and Meshach Taylor, who joined the series in Season 1 as delivery man Anthony Bouvier and died in 2014.
“It’s ironic to me that Designing Women never got an Emmy for anything except hairdressing,” creator Linda Bloodworth-Thomason says. “I think they were saying, ‘We like your hair. You need to shut your mouth.‘” That was never going to happen.
Thirty years ago, Designing Women debuted on CBS’s fall schedule and introduced TV viewers to the women of the fledgling Atlanta interior design firm Sugarbaker & Associates. There was sophisticated widow Julia Sugarbaker (Dixie Carter), nicknamed “The Terminator” for her verbal assassinations of the sexist, bigoted, and otherwise ignorant; Julia’s younger sister, Suzanne (Delta Burke), the former beauty queen who wined and dined clients as well as any rich older gentlemen who could be her next husband; Mary Jo Shively (Annie Potts), the single mother who looked at Julia as a mentor both professionally and personally and at Suzanne as a silly person (“But of course, in the South, we embrace that,” Potts says); and Mary Jo’s close friend Charlene Frazier (Jean Smart), the gullible church-going office manager from Poplar Buff, Missouri who alphabetized Suzanne’s alimony checks while waiting for her own true love to come along.
To quote Season 2’s “Dash Goff, The Writer,” they were “sweet-smelling, coy, cunning, voluptuous, voracious, delicious, pernicious, vexing and sexing, these earth sister rebel mothers, these arousers and carousers…” Or, to put it slightly less eloquently, they were smart, opinionated, man-loving feminists who defied the stereotypes of women — and Southerners — on TV.
To celebrate the show’s 30th anniversary, Yahoo TV looks back at Designing Women‘s first five seasons through interviews with Bloodworth-Thomason, Burke, Potts, and Smart. They also share fond memories of Carter, who passed away in 2010, and Meshach Taylor, who joined the series in Season 1 as delivery man Anthony Bouvier and died in 2014.