Susan Harris Looks Back on "Fay" (1975)

[JamesG]

In 1975, Harris teamed up with producers Paul Junger Witt and Tony Thomas for her first sitcom creation, "Fay", a sharply observed NBC comedy starring Lee Grant as a newly divorced forty-something woman reentering the workforce and the dating world.

Though the Witt/Thomas/Harris partnership would soon become a producing powerhouse, Fay lasted just 10 episodes, much to Harris’ consternation.



My first heartbreak was "Fay". I remember crying when that got canceled. And the next day I drove on the lot and my parking space was gone. It was that fast!

When they canceled us, I had no idea that that was what the meeting was going to be about. They called us into the network and they said, “Listen…” And I went berserk.



I said all kinds of terrible things to the network [vice president] Marvin Antonowsky. From then on, they would take any heavy objects, like ashtrays, out of the room [when they met with me] because I had made such a scene. Don’t take that literally. [Laughs]

Paul was having a meeting with another writer, Steve Gordon [who later wrote and directed Dudley Moore’s hit film Arthur], and I burst into the office. I said, “Fay was just canceled, and you’re having a meeting with another writer about another show?” I really was a little bit bonkers. Steve Gordon was terrified of me from that day on.

https://ew.com/tv/2018/10/15/susan-h...-oral-history/