The Best TV Shows That Started With Backdoor Pilots – Looper

Running from 1978 to 1986, the NBC sitcom “Diff’rent Strokes” followed the lives of the wealthy white Drummond family after adopting a pair of kids from Harlem. The producers cast veteran sitcom actor Charlotte Rae as Edna Garrett, the family’s witty, plain-spoken housekeeper, without an audition. Within the show’s first season, they decided to build a spinoff around her, giving Rae the option to go back to “Diff’rent Strokes” if it didn’t work out.

Using the show’s Season One finale as a pilot, “The Facts of Life” followed Mrs. Garrett’s move to work as a housemother for a girls-only boarding school dormitory located in a New York City suburb. There, she serves as a mother figure and de facto life coach for the adorable blabbermouth Tootie (Kim Fields), Tootie’s best friend Natalie (Mindy Cohn), tough Bronx girl Jo (Nancy McKeon), and archetypal popular girl Blair (Lisa Whelchel). Despite initially low ratings, the series ultimately became one of the longest-running sitcoms of the era and earned Charlotte Rae a Primetime Emmy for outstanding lead actress in a comedy series in 1982. Showrunners tried several times to reproduce the magic with seven episodes meant to serve as backdoor pilots, from “Brian & Sylvia,” which revolved around Tootie’s aunt and her white hockey coach husband, to “The Beginning of the End/Beginning of the Beginning,” which saw the school going co-ed and bringing in students that included Seth Green, Juliette Lewis, and Mayim Bialik.