Becoming a part of the popular conversation in the mid-1970s was the phrase “Jiggle Television,” which was designed by NBC to be an insult to ABC’s programming of the time. Instead, it became a short-hand, if you will, to describe shows like Lynda Carter‘s Wonder Woman, the ladies of Charlie’s Angels, and, of course, Three’s Company. The latter focuses on Chrissy Snow (Suzanne Somers), Janet Wood (Joyce DeWitt) and Jack Tripper (the late John Ritter), living together platonically and pretending that Jack is gay to keep their landlords, the Ropers (Norman Fell and Audra Lindley), at bay. The show would turn out to be a combination of slapstick humor and sexual innuendo usually arising from misunderstanding — and it was a huge hit.
“If you look back to ’70s sitcoms,” explains Chris Mann, author of 1998’s Come and Knock on Our Door: A Hers and Hers and His Guide to Three’s Company (which is being readied for an updated edition coming next year) in an exclusive interview, “you had All in the Family, which was so huge, and political and raw and real. And the same people who did Three’s Company had been writers on that show and went on to create and produce The Jeffersons, which was a spinoff of All in the Family. But they put that show in a lighter, more whimsical manner, so the time was right for a show like Three’s Company. So I think that Three’s Company initially resonated because it titillated viewers with sexual innuendos, sight gags, and really provocative banter about sex that had not been traversed so much in sitcoms.
“At the same time,” he continues, “it became and stayed a Top 10 hit because it was hysterical farce that made people laugh out loud. Once John Ritter’s physical comedy took over, and the show became more of a comedy misunderstanding — sexual and otherwise — it gave people a chance to feel liberated through laughter. The thing about Three’s Company is that people always assume the worse about others, and whether it was Mr. Roper fearing they were having orgies or whatever, it kind of showed us how we do jump to conclusions. Unless it’s a really sort of tragic situation, in general, there’s something innately funny about that.”
Not quite so funny was the behind-the-scenes drama that took place on the series, tearing relationships apart and threatening the longevity of Three’s Company as a whole.
John Ritter handled fame in stride.
It wasn’t too long into the show — which was in the Top 10 ratings for much of its 1977-84 run — before it caught the attention of the audience and became something of a pop culture phenomenon. This, in turn, had a powerful impact on its trio of stars who were all fairly early in their careers.
“John had done The Waltons for four years,” Chris explains. “He was a face that was popping up on all the MTM shows like Rhoda, Newhart, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. He also starred in The Barefoot Executive. So he was a face people were pretty familiar with, but because he grew up in showbiz with his dad [Tex Ritter] being this huge Western star, he was instilled with these sort of heartland values and took everything in stride. He had been around the block; he lived it. He saw how his dad handled it, so I think it excited him. It was a heady experience for all of them. I don’t see how it couldn’t be.”
Joyce DeWitt was interested in acting, not stardom.
Joyce began acting on stage at the age of 13 and had appeared on an episode of Baretta prior to her being cast as Janet on Three’s Company.
“Joyce,” Chris says, “was a theater actor. She, I don’t think, was prepared for the machinations of Hollywood at all. I don’t think she was ready for the publicity machine either, and she pulled back when she decided to put herself out there. It was not an easy experience for her. So those were the three reactions. On one hand, you had John; on the other, you had Suzanne either cultivating celebrity or adjusting to it; and then you had Joyce in the middle having a lot of conflict about how to navigate.”
A prime example of what was happening took place during the show’s second season when Newsweek did a cover story. While initially the trio of stars was thrilled with the attention, apparently Suzanne made a move that genuinely affected their relationship…
Things kind of imploded thanks to a magazine cover.
As Chris details, “Joyce wanted to be known as an actor and not a celebrity, and a lot of that feeling grew out of a Newsweek cover story. Suzanne had her own photo shoot before or after the shoot of the trio, which John and Joyce were very uncomfortable with, having Suzanne being featured. She had other shots of her in front of the pink or blue screen in a nightie. Apparently one of those shots was super-imposed over the image that Newsweek had of the three of them, and that created a lot of tension behind the scenes. It also further conflicted Joyce about doing publicity, because she felt lied to.”
John Ritter then wouldn’t work with Suzanne Somers.
The behind-the-scenes craziness on Three’s Company really heated up at the start of the fifth season where, reportedly under the insistence of her husband, Alan Hamel, Suzanne insisted on a pay increase from $30,000 per episode to $150,000. What resulted was litigation and her role is reduced to a phone call to her roommates from Chrissy Snow’s parents’ house. Additionally, a rift was created between her and John Ritter that wouldn’t be healed until shortly before his death some twenty years later.
“John pretty much refused to work with her,” says Chris. “The contract issues was the beginning of the end. Actually, he refused to work with her at the end of 1980. She then took her grievances to the press. Alan and she were revealing John’s salary and saying things on talk shows like if her name had been John Somers, this wouldn’t be happening, which only exacerbated the situation. There was, however, a moment when he had told Alan he would talk to Suzanne one-on-one, without him, without publicists, without managers or agents, and Suzanne did not take the invitation. So any chance for that to be salvaged in the spring of ’81 was pretty much completely torpedoed.
“The narrative about what happened has really been reduced to sound bites since John died,” he elaborates. “What happened was these negotiations started in summer of 1980 and they weren’t going anywhere. The meeting with Alan and [Three’s Company producer] Mickey Ross blew up, and then Suzanne came into work. And then she missed a show due to, she said, a rib injury. And then she came back, and then she missed another one. This was after a writers’ or actors’ strike in Hollywood at the time and the show was already in a bind, so she alienated a lot of other people on the show. And the way she handled the whole situation in the press was sort of the final nail in the coffin, I think. John seemed to navigate her whole, ‘I want to be the next Farrah Fawcett’ scenario pretty well. He seemed to forgive the Newsweek situation, and he seemed to look past some other things that were happening, but when her attitude became — and I’m quoting him here — ‘F you; I am Three’s Company,’ that’s when he drew the line. You know, it’s a little bit reminiscent of what’s happening now with Roseanne. You have this number one hit, this huge hit, that came crashing down for different reasons, but for something totally avoidable, and causing a lot of pain.”
Anger and negativity was not a normal response in John, Chris notes, but it was something he couldn’t help given what was going on: “There was a lot of love on that show, and he came onto that set every week, by all accounts, and just exuded love, made guest stars feel welcome, people feel important. He helped, I think, punch up some of the comedy bits for Joyce and Suzanne where they might have been lacking, and certainly afterward with the other women. And I think he took it as a personal betrayal by her. He took it personally when she did what she did in Season 5.”
Don Knotts becomes a part of the show.
At the end of Season 3, Norman Fell and Audra Lindley left the show for their own spin-off, The Ropers, which, only lasted a single season with the actors then discovering that they wouldn’t be able to return to the parent series. The reason for that is that actor Don Knotts had been brought aboard at the start of Season 4 as new building owner (and self-perceived ladies’ man) Ralph Furley. Having endeared himself to TV audiences of the 1960s as Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show, Don found himself exposed to a whole new audience.
“What struck me about Don when I met him,” Chris reflects, “is how sort of un-Furley-like he was. I expected him to be this very super animated and wacky guy, but he’s a very unassuming man. At times, a man of few words, but there was never any feeling communicated to me other than happiness about being on that show.”
Eventually, Don had an important impact on the series, particularly after Suzanne Somers was let go after Season 5, only to be replaced, first, by Jenilee Harrison as Chrissy’s clutzy cousin Cindy Snow; and then by Priscilla Barnes as registered nurse Terri Alden. Says Chris, “I don’t remember Jenilee and Priscilla really catching on. Jenilee was, I think, too young and thrown in there with little direction. A lot of the fans of the show think that Priscilla was great. She would never be Chrissy, but what happened is the focus post-Suzanne became on Don Knotts as the sort of dumb blond, so to speak. It became kind of a different show in that you didn’t have someone so flashy as Chrissy. So the third roommate role became a bit more of a supporting role with John and Joyce, and I think Priscilla did remarkably. I think she’s underrated, and people always have an affinity for the originals.”
Three’s Company comes to a close.
Three’s Company was eventually canceled by ABC in its eighth season due to plummeting ratings. “What’s so interesting,” Chris emphasizes, “is that in the last season of the show, John Ritter won an Emmy and a Golden Globe, and the show received the People’s Choice Award. A lot of fans feel that there are a handful of episodes in Season 8 that are among the series’ best. Things were still jelling so well, especially with the physical comedy, but I think what you had happening was a repeat of some storylines. On top of that, The A-Team premiered in ’83 on NBC and they were knocking off everything. They were the show that knocked off the Fonz [Happy Days], and it knocked off The Jeffersons. Three’s Company had also lost its lead-in with Laverne and Shirley in ’83. So the sitcom itself was dying out.
“You had a couple of exceptions with Cheers and Family Ties. The Cosby Show was a couple of years off, but Cheers and Family Ties weren’t huge hits in the beginning, so there wasn’t a lot of support for the genre. But the falling ratings were not, in my opinion, because Suzanne left the show or the Ropers left the show. The show was completely reinvigorated in Season 6; the episode where John did the extended dance sequence on liquor and some sort of tranquilizer is one of the standout episodes of any sitcom. It ranks up there with Lucy stomping grapes or in the chocolate factory. But I think the show was sort of taken out before it was completely overstaying its welcome if that makes sense.”
Joyce DeWitt felt betrayed by John Ritter.
The British show that had inspired Three’s Company in the first place — Man About the House — had spawned a spin-off called Robin’s Nest, which set up the male character from that show in an apartment with the woman he’d fallen in love with, while dealing with her father who was constantly trying to break them up. That pretty much sums up the American version, Three’s a Crowd, as well. John reprised the role of Jack Tripper, with Mary Cadorette as Vicky Bradford and Robert Mandan as her father, James, in the show that debuted the September after Three’s Company came to an end. All of that came as a surprise to Joyce DeWitt when she inadvertently found out that casting for Vicky was taking place and that the character was going to be introduced toward the end of Three’s Company‘s final year.
“TV Guide had done a cover story titled, ‘John Ritter: He’s Looking For a Different Trip Now’,” points out Chris. “So I think the writing was sort of on the wall that Three’s Company would be winding down, but for whatever reason John followed the producers’ advice not to disclose to Joyce that they had planned to spin off his character at the end of Season 8. So there was deception there that she took personally. John was in a very tricky situation, and maybe there was a better way to handle it, but there were certainly differences on the set then.”
Three’s a Crowd was a disaster.
The spin-off simply didn’t work, which wasn’t really a surprise to Chris even when considering what a success the first series had been. While he believed that John Ritter remained the energetic center of the show, he needed “the right ensemble with him, as Jack Tripper, to make everything click. I think you had a case of going from the right ensemble to the wrong ensemble. They should have incorporated some of the characters from Three’s Company and treated it a little bit more like Frasier. But it just sort of, in a sense, killed off the characters from Three’s Company, which was a misfire.
Overall, the actors look fondly back at the series.
The magic of Three’s Company is that despite all of that behind-the-scenes turmoil, the show was genuinely funny, a stand-out for its time, and remains beloved by its millions of fans. Yet one has to wonder what feeling those who labored to bring it to life came away with at the end. That’s a question that Chris certainly can address having spoken to so many members of the cast and crew.
“Overall, it was a happy experience, and I think that’s why the endings were so bitter and, at times, devastating,” he suggests, “because it was a happy set, but various people had bad exits and that contrast was a very hard pill to swallow. You look at Suzanne, for instance, and you can’t help but feel, ‘Suzanne, how could you wreck this happy, fun, successful thing?’ It makes you wonder, was there not gratitude? Was there not a sense of really understanding how lucky one is when they’re in a spot like that?”
“But my overall impression,” continues Chris, “is that John was very grateful for the opportunity, and overall he looked back at it fondly, even though the media trashed the show. Suzanne, you know, it’s like any relationship that ends badly, the stuff that came before is either a bit murky or outsized by the bad ending. I think she looked back with some resentment, because she felt she brought the show to number one, and was terribly mistreated at the end. At the same time, she looked back at this as, ‘This is my opportunity to do all this other stuff.’ So she had those two sorts of prisms. And Joyce looked back with mixed feelings that this was a very special experience that left her broken-hearted, and I think the book was the beginning of a much-needed dialogue. Even though I was the person they were speaking to, in a sense they were also speaking to each other through the book. I think it was the beginning of a bit of catharsis for Joyce and Suzanne to get back to feeling a bit more of the joy.
The story will continue.
When he was writing the book, someone commented to Chris that he was not a counselor, but that didn’t faze him at all. “This,” he says, “was an experience for me to recapture the essence of something that brought a lot of people joy, and that created joy among these people. To get back to the joy, and then, reading into the why, the flip side of that was so painful. It was a rocky road for me to navigate, but I feel I did it. I hope that there was some healing out of it, because, of course, John passed a few years after the book was published. You know, Three’s Company was lightning in a bottle, and that bottle shouldn’t have exploded into a bunch of shards the way that it did. It’s unfortunate, but for me as a storyteller, wanting to get through the Suzanne aspect of it, it certainly made for a compelling journey.”
That journey will continue in the previously-mentioned revised edition of Come and Knock On Our Door as well as his biography of John Ritter, which, he says, “via interviews with his family and friends, will explore the profound needs that drove John to be a brilliant force of laughter and humanity, on camera and off, as well as a demonstrably loving family man—despite the at times overwhelming inner pain he long kept from view.
