How Season Six was the series’s most pivotal season
In the unlikely event that you, dear reader, are unaware of the greatest news of 2015, The Facts of Life complete series has FINALLY been released on DVD.
I know DVD is old school these days, and they’re probably only selling it to squeeze a few more dollars out of people like me before it ends up streaming on Netflix. I’m OK with that. I’m trying to enjoy this tremendous treat in small doses so I can extend the joy. That didn’t stop me from binge-watching Season Six upon receipt of the series, though. A girl’s gotta have some kind of fulfillment.
I’ve had each of seasons one through five on DVD since their release dates. I’ve caught scattered episodes of seasons six through nine (Nick at Nite, Comcast on-demand). I also have my own collection that I put together myself back in the day:
But it doesn’t get airplay anymore, VHS players are getting harder to find, and when you’ve got the real, uncut thing on DVD, you realize how much of the episodes got lost in syndication. What this all means is that I haven’t really watched seasons six through nine properly in well over a decade. I had forgotten – or maybe I never even noticed – how very important season six was. It was. Let me tell you how.
It started in fall of 1984. The ’70s were dead and the ’80s were moving from adolescence to adulthood. Prince had just released the Purple Rain movie. Dynasty, Dallas, and Falcon Crest were among the top-rated TV shows. We were starting to hear about Wham! and Madonna.
In Peekskill, though, it didn’t seem as though much had changed. The girls continued to work at Edna’s Edibles. Jo and Blair continued at Langley College in their sophomore years, Natalie continued at Eastland in her senior year, and Tootie continued at Eastland in her junior year.
But slowly and quietly, the girls were making important transitions. Take Jo’s hair, for example. From the time she first appeared in season two, she wore her signature three-banded ponytail (except on very special occasions, when she took out the third band). Season six has Jo not only letting her hair down, but curling it. Perhaps she even got it permed.
Tootie, meanwhile, finally gets her braces off! It doesn’t happen with a ticker-tape parade and a shower of confetti, but it happens. When exactly it happens, though, is a bit of a mystery. In the first episode of the season Tootie clearly still has her braces. They even joke about how Tootie will go straight from “braces to dentures.”
Four episodes later, when they go cruising in Blair’s car, Tootie’s braces are off.
They’re back again the very next episode (a Very Special one-hour episode about Jo dating her professor), only to be gone again the next episode after that.
They come back again three episodes later in “Smile” and disappear again right after that in “The Rich Aren’t Different.” They stay off for two more episodes before coming back again in “Working it Out” and disappearing again in the very next episode.
Fortunately they stay that way for the rest of the series, ’cause all this picture-cropping is getting ridiculous. In addition, with six episodes to go in the season, they changed Kim Fields’s opening credits scene to a braces-less one, but they go back to the one with the braces in the opening credits for the last episode. Go figure.
It’s hardly unheard of for a show to air episodes out of the order they’re filmed, but it’s fun for a geek like me to find those sort of inconsistencies. Also, the show deserves credit for the fact that Tootie’s braces are off when the episode “Jazzbeau” begins, but they reappear in flashbacks, which take place over the summer.
The girls were undergoing their transformations at the same time as American culture was. We get our first red flag that things are going to change in the second half of the decade when “Me and Eleanor” begins with a cheezball establishing shot so typical of ’80s sitcoms.
Perhaps it didn’t help that after being in the top 30 during seasons two and three, the show lost its top ranking in season four. Perhaps that’s why it sought the change of scenery to Edna’s Edibles; it reclaimed its top 30 position in season five. Maybe at the beginning of season six, the viewership started lacking again, so the girls had to grow up in a hurry. There wasn’t much left at Eastland, and new adventures were necessary. So Blair and Jo got mid-season mullets…
…and the girls stopped wearing non-intrusive, low-key casual outfits and started wearing the garish fashions of the ’80s. Here is what Blair, Tootie, and Natalie wore to Mrs. Garrett’s wedding (which ended up getting called off for a season).
And the jumpsuits. Oh the jumpsuits. I can’t lie, we all wore them.
Jo apparently had a closet full of the ugliest jumpsuit ever in every available color.
I was surprised to find a number of episodes in the second half of season six that I thought were from later seasons. They’re some of my favorites (like the two-parter in Ft. Lauderdale), but there is a distinct difference in the feeling between the first and second half of the season. The show underwent a transformation that some would call its decline. I don’t know about that. There are some gems and some stinkers in every season, and I love the show in its entirety. There are some episodes in season nine that I love as much as my favorites from the early years. There are some episodes throughout the series that I hardly ever watch. Obviously the powers that be prefer the early days, since they’ picked a season five photo for the cover of the complete series box, but I’m glad the late season DVDs have contemporary cast photos.
Worse, better, or neutral, The Facts of Life was a very different show at the beginning of season six than it was at the end. I don’t know what that means yet, but I know it’s important.
