The Facts of Life Spent Its Series Finale Basically Ignoring The Facts of Life Cast

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https://popculturereferences.com/the...-of-life-cast/

In the latest in a feature spotlighting backdoor pilots, Brian shows how The Facts of Life series finale mostly ignored the actual cast of the show to spotlight a possible continuation spinoff of the series featuring Blair running the Eastland Academy.



Today, we look at how the cast of The Facts of Life barely got to factor into the series finale of The Facts of Life.

This is Back Door Blues, a feature about “backdoor pilots.” Backdoor pilots are episodes of regular TV series that are intended to also work as pilots for a new series. Sometimes these pilots get picked up, but a lot of times they did not get picked up. I’ll spotlight examples of both successful and failed backdoor pilots.

December is a month of Back Door Blues! This is a special week’s worth of Facts of Life-related backdoor pilots!

CONCEPT: Eastland Academy – Eastland graduate Blair Warner (Lisa Whelchel) runs a revamped Eastland Academy, which is now co-ed

SERIES IT AIRED ON Facts of Life

As I noted in the last installment, about Natalie (Mindy Cohn) moving to Soho to try to make it as a writer (also an attempted spinoff), one of the major problems of The Facts of Life was that it was a show following a group of high school students, but it ran for NINE SEASONS. Do you know what you get when you start a series with a 16-year-old girl and run for nine seasons? You have yourself a 24-year-old grown ass woman, and by the end of the series, Jo and Blair were very much grown ass women. Jo even got MARRIED towards the end of the final season!

So while the girls were somehow all still living together in the final season, there was some real difficulty in having the characters find reasons to even really INTERACT with each other, as Natalie and Tootie were still in college, Jo was working as a social worker, Blair was in law school, and Beverly (Cloris Leachman), Mrs. Garrett’s sister who moved in as the girls’ new mother figure, REALLY didn’t have a purpose on the show (like ZERO purpose). Still, it was awfully irritating to see the show spend its penultimate episode pretty much being a Natalie solo episode setting up HER proposed spinoff, and then the two-part series finale, “The Beginning of the End”/”The Beginning of the Beginning” setting up Blair’s spinoff.

Blair’s spinoff seemed like it had a much better chance of working out, and, to be frank, perhaps you could argue that a reason the original cast members didn’t get as much of a sendoff was because they were so confident that the spinoff would go to series that they felt that they could catch up on the other girls in the new series.

In any event, the concept of the finale was Blair discovering that the girls’ alma mater, Eastland Academy, was in dire financial straits, so Blair shockingly decides to drop out of law school and use her entire trust fund to buy the school, and become the new headmistress. Just like how Natalie’s spinoff had some nice casting, this new series also had excellent casting, with the current Eastland student populace including Mayim Bialik and Juliette Lewis (as well as Meredith Scott Lynn)…



Blair then decided that the only way for the school to survive was to make it co-ed, and so we met a bunch of new guy students, including one kid played by a young Seth Green.

One of the teachers at the school would be Blair’s new love interest.

Then, after the spinoff takes up about 40 out of 46 minutes in the final two episodes, the show then wraps up Tootie and Jo’s plots in the last five minutes of the show (as well as having Natalie briefly phone in), with Tootie getting accepted into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in England, and Jo’s husband, Rick (Scott Bryce) returning from the road to be with his wife. He then takes a photo of the girls (late season addition, Pippa, who was an Eastland student, so would have clearly been in the new series, is inexplicably also in the photo, but MacKenzie Astin, who had been part of the show for years at this point, isn’t in the finale at ALL), sans Natalie, and that image ends the series. It’s so hilariously abrupt. Other shows have used their finale to set up new series, but in those instances, the PENULTIMATE episode is then typically the “true” finale. This is definitely the “true” finale, it just barely features the original cast. So weird.

DID THE PILOT GO TO SERIES? Nope, which I’m sure was quite a shock.

SHOULD IT HAVE? I think it was a fine premise, so yes. And what strong casting!

[80s Dude]

No. Mindy and Nancy M. were leaving the show for good.

[rusty spike]

I think only Lisa was interested in continuing the series thru a spin-off. I'm pretty sure that everyone else was looking forward to doing other projects. Yeah, the back door finale was a disappointment for the fans, but the best episodes had already played out when Charlotte was on the show.

[Natalie1969]

Andy was in the beginning of Part 1 when Blair comes in announcing that Eastland was closing. He was coming out of the kitchen into the living/dining room area with Pippa and a snack of a drink and cookies. He made comments about how he was disappointed that Eastland was closing cuz not having those 200 girls is not his idea of a fun puberty and when Blair says shes going to call and have her father buy the school he says anything you can do to keep 200 love bunnies in my zip code would be greatly appreciated. After that his role is over.

[paul.austin]

Mayim getting this AFTERFacts means no Blossom and possibly no Amy Farrah Fowler (though the various temporal butterflies might see to no TBB at all).

[paul.austin]

Oh and Juliette Lewis will be unavailable for National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.

[TMC]

Did you know there was a planned Blair Warner spinoff after The Facts of Life?

When Facts of Life bought the farm, the Collector's Call host bought the school!

[BestTVever]

I liked the finale for the fact the secretary of Eastland was the mother from Lotsa Luck. It was good to see her on TV again even though it was for one episode.

[JoPol_wannabe]

Originally Posted by BestTVever

I liked the finale for the fact the secretary of Eastland was the mother from Lotsa Luck. It was good to see her on TV again even though it was for one episode.

She was also in an episode of Mama’s Family where she arm wrestled Thelma and lost.

[paul.austin]

"Do you think I over-boobed?" is right up there with "Do hookers go to Heaven?"!

[TMC]

A post shared by on Jan 01, 2022 at 12:00pm PDT

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This is a scene from "The Beginning Of The Beginning", "the 24th episode (and 201st overall) from the ninth and final season of the long-running 1979-88 NBC comedy, "The Facts Of Life", which was a spin-off of the 1978-86 NBC/ABC sitcom "Diff'rent Strokes". This episode is the second part of the series finale. This originally aired Saturday, May 7, 1988.

Several life-changing events are affecting the core four girls of the show. Blair Warner (Lisa Whelchel) has learned that her old school, Eastland School For Girls, is closing it's doors. To that end, she buys the school and makes it a co-ed school to ensure it's survival.

Blair's frenemy Jo Polniaczek (Nancy McKeon) has recently gotten married to her longtime boyfriend Rick (Scott Bryce). With his music career taking flight in Las Vegas, Jo prepares to leave Peekskill to be with him.

Not long after losing her virginity to her boyfriend Snake, Natalie Green (Mindy Cohn) has decided to take a leave of Peekskill as well, and relocates to New York City, where she moves into a SoHo loft with some roommates. She plans to pursue her writing career.

Dorothy "Tootie" Ramsey (Kim Fields) gets her wish when her application to the Royal Dramatic Arts Academy in London accepts her application to come and attend the school.

While this wasn't a traditional series finale like other sitcoms, this one is seemingly more realistic. After 9 years of being together through thick and thin, the girls viewers first met in 1979 have now grown into independent young women by 1988.

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