FLO Tv Guide article Pt. 2

[JeffRuss1972]

CONCLUSION from previous Thread:

"The puzzle-solving of Flo came fairly easily, unlike the problems I had with, say, Medea, in college," explains Polly. "First of all, the dialogue made it clear that Flo came from the South, as I had, so I was able to draw on actual people I had known back in Alabama. From the way she talked, I deduced that Flo wasn't well educated, that she'd been around and that she'd been married perhaps three times. I imagined that her first husband was a race-car driver, the second Flo wouldn't talk about and the third was a Bible salesman a lot younger than she.
"Then, presuming she is my age and has been married three times, she probably dropped out of school at 16 after having led a very active social life. I knew girls just like that back home. Without much of an education, Flo couldn't get a skilled job and felt extremely insecure about it. Such people tend to overreact and put on a front. Also, because she seemed to mother-hen the younger waitresses in ALICE, I figured that she was an older sister in a large family."

ALICE's delighted writers used nearly all of these fruits of Polly's "puzzle-solving," devoting an entire script, for example, to the return of that imaginary race-driver first husband.
Warner Bros. was equally delighted at the end of the first year, when ALICE was still shaky, the studio put Polly under option for a new series. At the end of the second season, April 1978, the FLO spin-off was almost a certainty and Polly was set to work writing down her ideas about what the new series should be. This time she was over her head. She theorized that Flo would go home to Cowtown, Texas, and settle in with her domineering mother and misanthropic sister (so far so good) but that she would fall madly in love with a politician who gets elected governor, thus making her the First Lady of Texas and a comical misfit among a lot of high-class people in the state capital.
"No, no, no," said Alan Shayne. The studio and CBS then hired three writers, Harvey Bullock, Jim Parker and Pam Chais, to sit down with her and "conceptualize." The conceptualizing went on for several months, after which two other writers, Jenna McMahon and Dick Clair, were hired to confer with Polly and commit the conceptualizing to paper. By now, the current format had emerged---with Flo going home, buying the Yellow Rose beer joint, and wrestling weekly with the problems of its employees and habitu'es, as well as the complications of her own personal life. The hiring of writer-producer Jim Mulligan from M*A*S*H resulted in some final refining, in concert with Polly, and the series was ready to make its debut on March 24, 1980.
Above and beyond that first week as No. 1, the ratings results were quite astounding. Only six episodes were taped and five of the six ended up in the Top 10. The only loser was against the Academy Awards on ABC, and even FLO drew a respectable 27-per-cent share, while most of ABC's opposition was totally squashed that night. With the actor's strike delaying the start of the new season, it's too early to know how FLO will fare in its new time slot, leading off Monday night at 8 P.M. (ET)---against ABC's THAT'S INCREDIBLE! and without the helpful M*A*S*H lead-in.

Polly doesn't seem to care a whit about such technicalities. She doesn't seem to care a whit, either, about her newfound stardom. Tall and bone-thin, she dresses simply. With her gray-streaked dark hair, she looks like a small-college dean as soon as she takes off Flo's tight satin pants and flamboyant red wig. She has only a small apartment in Los Angeles and a smaller one in New York, saying, "I am unmarried and bicoastal." She drives a 1972 Chevrolet and refuses to move up to the usual television star's Mercedes or Porsche. "Why should I?" she asks. "My Chevy runs perfectly fine." One of her greater pleasures is shopping at Pic 'N' Save, a Los-Angeles chain of discount knick knackery stores.
What she enjoys more than anything is working with Mulligan and his staff of five writers. "We meet weekends," she says, "and it's really fun. It's an extension of my own puzzle-solving, except now we do it together. How are we going to bring in the second husband Flo won't talk about? How can we build a story about Miriam's much-talked-about husband? What if Farley, the banker, gets caught in a political scandal? What if someone abandons an infant with Earl, the bartender? How can we come up with more movie parodies like the ones we did with Texas versions of 'High Noon' and 'Casablanca' in Flo's Yellow Rose?"

With Polly, however, it's a different matter down on the set. She puts up stern signs reading, "No Visitors Backstage 30 Minutes Before Shooting." Says Joyce Bulifant, "We're all from the theater, so the discipline is enforced. Polly is tough. I can have a dispute with her about a line and do it my way for a few days, but I always end up doing it HER way. On the other hand, she can come up to me and help me develop my character, saying, 'Just think of how you considered yourself hot stuff when you used to go out to the cemetary on double dates and do a lot of necking'."
Producer Mulligan is convinced that Polly has an enormous future in television, no matter how FLO eventually turns out. "How can you stop a woman," he asks, "who is as brainy as Polly and who can wiggle her tail like Flo does?" END