Every episode of Three’s Company revolves around a misunderstanding, but Suzanne Somers’s abrupt departure from the show was a real upset that network executives were unwilling to fix.
The iconic sitcom debuted on March 15, 1977, and catapulted Somers to stardom alongside her TV roommates John Ritter and Joyce DeWitt. The quirky antics of the trio in Apartment 201—with Somers as Chrissy Snow, Ritter as Jack Tripper, and DeWitt as Janet Wood—helped make the show a mainstay of the Nielsen Top 10.
By 1980, Somers—who died on October 15, 2023, at age 76—had graced the covers of numerous magazines and seemed to be at the peak of her career. More importantly, she knew her worth to the show. When it came time to negotiate a contract, she set a reasonable bar: equal to her male co-stars.
When Somers first signed on to the show, she agreed to a salary of $3,500 a week to play the cheerful Chrissy. As the show gained traction, her salary increased, and she was soon earning $30,000 a week. “I have the highest demographic of all women in television, 18 to 49,” she said in a 2009 interview for the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
With a deeper understanding of the industry than when she started, she began negotiating her contract for season five with equal pay in mind. “I looked around and thought, ‘Why are all the men… making 10 times more?’” she asked. Her co-stars, Ritter and DeWitt, had already signed, so she told them in advance that she was going to go hard.
“I told John and Joyce… I’m going to ask for a big paycheck and a bonus and if you two back me… we’re all going to get it, so I’m going to be the one to take the hit,” she continued.
Her husband, former TV producer Alan Hamel, negotiated on her behalf, asking for $150,000 a week, which was the median salary for men in television at the time and on par with what her co-star Ritter was earning. (She said she didn’t know at the time that Ritter was earning more because all three had national preference clauses.)
Negotiations for another show influenced the outcome
Before arriving at the meeting that morning, Hamel checked with Somers, theorizing that things might “fall apart.” “I said, ‘They’re not going to write Chrissy off,’” she recalled in her interview with the Academy.
What Somers and Hamel didn’t know at the time was that ABC executives were tightening their belts because they had just struck a deal with Laverne & Shirley stars Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams, and were paying the two women more than they expected.
“Laverne and Shirley had just negotiated a huge deal, and then they decided they needed to make an example of the actresses so that no other women would want to be paid the same as the men,” Hamel told People.
In a time before cell phones, Somers waited anxiously at home. “So I heard the front door open, and I could tell it wasn’t good by the way it closed and the sound of his footsteps coming up the stairs,” she recalled. That’s when he told her she was fired.
After she was fired, Somers was escorted to the set by a police officer
As if that wasn’t enough of a blow, they hadn’t finished filming the fifth season, so she had to return to the set. But things weren’t business as usual.
“So what they did was they made me finish the year but shortened my time by a minute,” Somers explained in her Academy interview. “They built this little set—it was crazy what they did. They would have a police officer come to me at the back door, bring me in. I wasn’t allowed to see anyone from the original show, just the wardrobe guy, who would bring me a pair of boxers and a few other things.”
On that sparse set was a chair, a phone, and a light—with a camera filming her speaking lines into the phone. “I felt like I was being punished like I was a bad girl. It brought up all those old feelings of low self-esteem,” Somers recalls. That degrading treatment stemmed from her demand for equal pay with the men. “It was just a bad time,” she says.
The industry shunned her, so she reinvented herself
Off the set, life wasn’t any better. She went from being the most coveted actress in the demographic to not even being able to get an interview with any press outlet. “I sat home for the better part of the year, thinking, ‘Why did I do it? Here I had the world by the tail… why did I think that I should be paid what they’re paying the men?’” Somers said in the Academy interview.
But one day, everything clicked. “I hear voices sometimes, not in a weird way,” she explained. “I hear a voice in my head, like a loudspeaker. It says, ‘Why are you focused on what you don’t have? Why don’t you focus on what it is you do have?’” And that’s when she realized the gift Three’s Company had given her that it couldn’t take away: visibility.
Using her name and face recognition, she plotted not a comeback, but a reinvention. “Everybody in this country knows my name—I have visibility,” she said of the realization. “That’s something.” Soon she was starring in a Las Vegas production with 13 dancers and a 27-piece orchestra, performing a lively revue with classic stage songs like “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” And in 1987, she was named Las Vegas Entertainer of the Year along with Frank Sinatra.
Somers became a successful entrepreneur, most famously serving as the spokesperson for the ThighMaster exercise machine in the 1990s. In 2014, she was inducted into the Direct Response—a.k.a. “informercial”—Hall of Fame. She was also a fitness and beauty line owner, author, and talk show host.
She even made a triumphant return to the small screen. Starting in 1991, Somers played Carol Foster-Lambert on the popular sitcom Step by Step alongside Patrick Duffy for seven seasons. She also served as a co-host for the comedy show Candid Camera and stepped into the ballroom in 2015 on the ABC reality competition Dancing with the Stars.
All of this success stemmed from her decision to ask for equal pay. “That was the great thing about being fired,” Somers told People in 2020. “I would have never been able to do what I do now.”
Somers relied on her resilience in other ways, too. She was treated for cancer three times during her tenure on Three’s Company and found out she had breast cancer in 2000. Once again, treatment allowed her to live cancer-free for nearly 16 years. But this July, the actor and entrepreneur announced her breast cancer had returned. Somers died one day before her 77th birthday.
