| F E A T U R E S T H O U G H T S R E V I E W S N E W S e v e n t s d i r e c t o r y | |
The Complete First and Second Seasons By Tiffany Razzano You take the good. You take the bad. You take them both and there you have the first two seasons of The Facts of Life on DVD. Finally. The show was immensely popular during it's nine-year run between 1979 and 1988 and enjoyed nearly a decade in syndication after that, but only now is it starting to come out on DVD. It's especially surprising that this didn't happen sooner because of the TV on DVD craze that's been going on since around 2000. It's been a while since it's been on TV, but from the very first episode you're able to transition smoothly back into life at Eastland School with Mrs. Garrett and the girls. Charlotte Rae as Mrs. Garrett, in this Diff'rent Strokes spin-off, is as much a breath of fresh air today as she was in the 1980s. Motherly, but not oppressive, she was a friend to the girls but still taught them lessons about life that didn't come across as hackneyed or contrived. And though she was an older lady, she's young at heart with a lot of personality. Watching the first and second seasons back to back after all these years really highlighted the differences between the two seasons. In the first season, Mrs. Garrett is the housemother for seven girls living at Eastland. It was a large cast for a half hour show, but the girls worked well together and the characters with lesser personality helped those with more personality to really shine. But still, there was something special about each character. When the cast came back for the second season the entire show had been rearranged. Mrs. Garrett was back, of course. But she had shed 25 pounds, been promoted to school dietician and adopted a more modern, professional and worldly manner of dressing. Many of the girls who had been featured in the first season - Nancy, Sue Ann, Molly and Cindy - were gone, for the most part, relegated to floating around the background and occasionally showing up for a line or two in a scene. The three girls who had shown the most personality in the first season - the rich, beautiful and conceited Blair Warner, the witty, chubby, girl-next-door Natalie Green and the young, fun, loose-lipped Tootie Ramsey - were the focus of this season. To complement the group, they brought in tough girl, Brooklynite Jo Polniaczek. Jo and Blair immediately formed a rapport, a love-hate relationship, that would last the run of the show and remain one of its focuses. While you miss the other girls during the first few episodes of the second season, the new format focusing on the main four, who after nearly being expelled, are forced to live together above the kitchen and are put in Mrs. Garrett's watch, eventually wins you over. The first disc of the set also has a nice Remembering the Facts of Life featurette and After Facts featurette, where the cast members, including the girls from the first season, reminisce about their time on the show and talk about what they did afterwards. A lot of them went on to lead very normal lives outside of the entertainment industry. This DVD was definitely worth the long wait. Hopefully the next two seasons won't take as long to come out. |
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