Designing Women with Maggie Friedman

Welcome to Eighties TV Ladies, part of the weirding Way Media Network. Eighties Lend So Pretty, Through the City, The money Man World. Welcome to Eighties tv Ladies, the pop culture podcast where we look at female driven television shows from the nineteen eighties with your hosts Susan Lambert Adam and Sharon Johnson. Hello, I'm Sharon and I'm Susan, and today we'll be talking about Designing Women with our very special guest and friend, Maggie Friedman. A few of our listeners suggested this show Designing Women, but really, this is a Sharon pick.

It sure is. This is one of the shows that I thought of when we first started talking about doing this Podcasting Women is a sitcom that aired on CBS for seven seasons nineteen eighty six to nineteen ninety two. A light workplace in family comedy that looked at the lives of four women and one man working at Sugar Baker and Associates, an interior design firm in Atlanta, Georgia. It starred Delta Burke, Dixie Carter, Annie Potts, Jeane Smart, and me Shack Taylor. Delta Burke and Dixie Carter play sisters Dixie plays the recently widowed, fire tongued matriarch Julia sugar Baker.

Delta Burke plays Suzanne sugar Baker, Julia's spoiled younger sister and thrice divorced ex beauty queen Mary Joe is their neighbor and interior designer, played by Annie Potts. She's single, mom, She's divorced, She's a little bit nervous. Charlene is the office manager and friend. They all have a financial investment in the business, and there was a reunion special in two thousand and three. There is a lot to talk about today, so let us introduce our special guest, Maggie Freeman.

Maggie is a phenomenal writer, producer, and showrunner and friend. She got her start writing television on Wasteland in nineteen ninety nine, a short lived Kevin Williamson show. She went on to work on shows like Once and Again, Dawson's Creek, and Jack and Bobby, a show which I loved and unfortunately only lasted about twelve episodes. Maggie has created and is showrunner of several shows, including Which Is of East End and most recently, Firefly Lane starring Katherine Heigel and Sarah Chalk. Welcome to the show.

Maggie. Thank you so glad to have you here. I'm so glad to have you here and to be talking about designing women. But before we really dive in, we need to know what designing women characters we each are. Oh, are you a Julia, A Suzanne, A Mary, Joe or Charlene.

I would like to think that I'm a Julia. I would always find myself watching the show and going, yes, that's exactly it. But I don't know that I have or had Julia's ability to speak up for herself in the way that she did and say what she meant. So I'm a I'll just call myself a Julia. Wanna be?

I think you're a Julia for sure. Oh, I don't say nearly half the things it comes, no, But you know what again, television is a fantasy version of ourselves, right, So you can be Julia. You're like a real life Julia. Even if you say half of what Julia says in that show, then you're really a Julia. But you know, because I think most of us say about you know, a twentieth of what characters say on television, I'll take that.

Okay, So which which character are you? Right? So I think I'm Mary Joe because Annie Potts is the mom. Yeah, I totally always sort of gravitated to her on the show, and because the character is like a little naive but also kind of smart and bitter and sarcastic. But I dressed more like Anthony in the eighties, and I'm in an interior design firm.

I would not have been anything other than like calling stuff. So I in some ways, I'm a little bit the driving assistant who was just slipping things back and forth in the eighties. It would you would not have put me into an interior design firm in the South. All right, Maggie, I'm a married Joe too, you know, harry, single, mom, neurotic, not quite together. Yeah, yeah, okay, but you know, I don't know, because you're also so very smart.

Oh, thank you. And Mary Joe was smart. She is smart, and she's you know, I think when it comes down to it, she's got some really great speeches that she makes, and that I had remembered rewatching all these episodes. I had remembered them all belonging to Julia. But Mary Joe steps up to the plate a few times in a great way, but it feels like a lot of times she's not that sure of herself.

She's a little anxious, and I identify with that. She's kind of a Julian training. Yeah, that's a good way to get it. Yeah. I think a lot of it has to do with, you know, her her ex husband.

She put him through medical school and then he dumps her. But she walks away from chooses to walk away from the marriage without taking anything from him. She wants to stand on her own. Yeah. So I think that says a lot about you're very independent.

Yeah, And and she cares so much about her kids, and she cares so much about her friends. But she's also a little neurotic. So all right, all right, Yeah, I think you're married, Joel. I feel like I'm married, Joe Melissa. Do you remember the show?

I just watched it. So what designing women are you? I don't know? Uh, I don't know. Well, which one do you think you're most like?

Because I feel like I have pieces of all of them in me. We probably all do. But Julie, which one in the eighties, which one were you most like? I guess I would have been more like Ganny Pots too. Yeah, although I don't know what, I don't identify with any of them.

All right, Well, we're going to get to that, Okay, all right, we're going to my little Cortner. We're gonna talk Melissa beat Her because we're going to come back to that, all right. So we're going to dive further into design one. But I want to start a little so that the viewer, viewers, listeners, viewers. Did I just say, viewers, listeners know a little bit about you?

Okay, how did you get started in television? Well, I grew up watching way too much television in the eighties and the nineties, and I thought I was going to be a novelist. That's what I always wanted to write, and I really wanted to when I was like twelve, I aspired to be Jackie Collins or Danielle Steele someday. Now are you reading those? Oh?

Yeah, I was reading them. Yeah. And then like when I was like thirteen or fourteen, I read less than zero and so I wanted to be Brett Easton Ellis And like my goal was I was going to publish a novel while I was still in college, because that's what Brett Easton Ellis did. And on the back of that book it said, you know in the blurb of the author blurb, but it said Brett Easton Ellis is a student at Bennington College. And I was like, that is the coolest thing I've ever seen.

It didn't happen, so I forever felt like a failure because I didn't But whatever, it's fine. And then so I yeah, I wanted to write books. And then I ended up taking a women filmmaker's class in college, and I realized I always loved TV and movies, but it didn't I just didn't think of it as a thing that I could do. And then when I took that women filmmakers class, I was like, oh, And so then I got really interested in making movies. So and I went to AFI.

We're study while I bounced around. I was at Bard. I went to the News School for a while and took I took a sixteen millimeter filmmaking course there and I made my own short film and I did all of it. I was a cinematographer. I was in it.

I endited it on a on a flatbed. And so then I met this I met this woman who was a student at AFI and she told me about it and I was like, that sounds amazing. I want to go there. And she said you'll never get in, and so then I was like, well, I have to go there now she being a girl, she was being a mean girl. Yeah, so whatever, it's fine.

I don't know. But so then I applied to a FI and and uh and I got in, thank god. And so I went there and studied screenwriting and and even still, like I thought, this was in like the late nineties, I thought I'm gonna write movies. So I wrote a script while I was there that ended up like winning an award at graduation, and that got kind of me a little bit of like, oh, I met a manager who's still my manager today and lovely Hollywood. Yeah.

He introduced me to an agent who's still my agent today. And she said, you know, I think you have a voice that could work on television. And it had not occurred to me to write television at that point, even though I was raised on TV. But but then I wasn't really watching a lot of TV like in the late nineties. So she gave me this was in like nineteen ninety nine.

She gave me a bunch of videotapes of the hit shows at the time, and she said, write a spec of one of these, and so I chose Ally McBeal, and I wrote a spec Ally McBeal, and then I had my little fee ture script, which I did end up selling eventually, but it never got made. But anyway, that got me a job on Kevin Williamson's show. This was after the success of Dawson's Creek was already on. He made another show called Wasteland and it was on ABC very briefly, but that was my first job, you know, sort of straight out of film school, and it was amazing. And then that got canceled very quickly.

We made thirteen episodes, and I don't think all of them merit. They didn't. I don't think they Also, I think they may have burned it off in the summer. Okay, I don't remember now, Yeah, it's a blur. But then I ended up jumping over to Dawson's Creek when that got canceled.

That was in season three of Dawson's like midway through, and I stayed there for a few years and that was great, I mean, and what a show to you know, both shows to start on, you get sort of both sides of like, I know, a show that sort of gets killed almost before it began, and then a show that is you know, on fire. Yeah it was crazy. Wow, Yeah, that's so cool. Beloved all right. So after Dawson's and what Happens, Well, so I was on Dawson's for a couple of years and then I got an offer to go write on a show called Once and Again, which was his Wick Kerskovitch show, you know, the guys who did thirty something, And Greg was running Dawson's at the time, Greg Borlany, and he very kindly let me go right on Once and Again because he was a huge Swire Kerskovitz fan.

And so I went over there and I got to work with Winnie Holtzman, who you know, well, I mean, come on, she's amazing. She created my soul called Life. She wrote the play Wicked, Yes, and she was actually writing Wicked at the time. So I got to witness a little bit of how that show came together, and I got to go to a stage reading very early on Chris. It was just like in a room at Disney, and Kristin Chenowith was there and a Dina Menzel and they were singing, you know, around the table.

It was insane. But and I actually just had lunch with Winnie about a week ago. I went over to our house and her husband, Paul Dooley was there. You know, he's like legendary Paul Dooley. He gave me a signed copy of this book that he just wrote about his life, which is amazing.

But their daughter, Savannah, who at the time when I was writing on Once and Again with Winnie, we were writing scripts together and she like totally took me under her wing mentored me. She's incredible. But Savannah, her daughter, was a teenager at the time, and now Savannah is a writer on my show Firefly Lane Alo, so and she's like amazing. They're both just like such incredible writers, so phenomenally talented. Yeah, yeah, that's amazing.

Yeah. That's what I love is that you had an agent, that agent, did you, Yeah, that said, hey, here's what you need to do. Yeah, and here's here's a good fit for you, which is what you imagine an agent's going to do, yes, but doesn't always I think result, which is why she's probably still your Yeah. She's great, Nancy, Yeah, Yeah, so then when Once and Again went off the air, I jumped back over to Dawson's for the last year, which was great. So I was there for seasons three, four, and six.

I skipped a year in between, but anyway, that's that's fantastic. Yeah. And then you've gone on to make your own shows, yes, and so yeah, and I've worked with your husband's Yeah. It's a social fun. Oh.

We had the best time on that show. It was so great. Before that show, Rich would be on a show and Miracles, I hung out because I knew a lot of people on that show. But the rest of the shows, I'm like, I'm not going anywhere near those shows. No.

I mean they were perfectly fine. They're perfectly fine people, and they're perfectly fine stuff. But that felt like family. It did. It's such a warm, welcoming and just fun, like just fun everybody on that show.

And that's a testament to you. Thanks. And I mean I got lucky and I chose well that group. We just clicked and they're all so talented but also really good people and just fun to hang out with. We had we in that writer's room.

We would laugh all day every day. It was it was just a blast. And Richard, you know, he's hilarious. He is a bright, shiny, shiny star. Yeah, I like him.

Yeah, keep him around for a while anyway. But they did not know what they had with wages of these stars. Yeah, we were doing solid in the ratings. We thought we were going to come back for a third year, and so we wrote a massive cliffhanger for the last episode and people are still mad about it. We sent one character to hell who was like a really beloved character.

Two of the character switched bodies, and one had to go to prison. It was a whole thing, and so we thought we were coming back. We really believed it, and then we didn't because I mean, part of it was the network was deciding to try to rebrand, yes, and so we were not part of their rebrand. And then that happens so many times, and it's it never is anything about the show. It has to do with it, you know.

That's. I mean, we and that cast. How incredible are that cast all? Like just I don't know, so good? I love them all and they all got along so well, just like the writers did.

You know, it was a really happy, harmonious place to work, which is you know which is special. It is special, all right, all right, all right, anyway, which is a step? All right, let's all go back to nineteen eighty six or the nineties when it was being rerun whenever we picked up on Designing Women, and let's I'd like to talk a little bit about what we remember before we started rewatching of Designing Women. I always remembered it, and I don't know how I glombed onto it or decided to start watching it. I just know that from the first episode I was just completely hooked.

And having rewatched it recently, we got one of Julia's famous speeches orations, whatever you want to call them. If she very very Julia like, just put ray Don in his place. That's by the beginning. That's yeah, that was in the pilot episode. And I'd forgotten that was in the pilot because I remember the whole ray Don of it all because of the way that she said it said that, thank you ray Don exactly in the pilot.

Yes, I watched it from the beginning and loved it from the from the very first episode and enjoyed the different different women. I always appreciated that they were different types of women. It was a cross section of a type of women. Woman from Julia who seem to have everything altogether, and you've got Delta Burke playing the former beauty queen, Mary, Joe the single mother, and Charlene who just looks at the world through some kind of rose colored glasses that maybe we all would like to put on from time to time. I just I love the show.

I just loved it. I love the friendship between them and Maggie. Do you remember the show, because you're you're a little bit younger than us, I do remember it. I did remember it. What I remember is a couple of things.

First of all, it was a little sophisticated for me at the time. It was a show we're reading some sophisticated. You're so sophisticated. But I mean at the time when that show was on, like I was deep in my like family ties, you know, cosby that that world. But my mom loved Designing Women, and I remember she also watched it a lot when it was in reruns on Lifetime.

Do you remember that. I feel like it was Lifetime. I could be wrong, but there was a there was a network, a channel that would play it all the time. This was how to have been lunch. Yeah, makes sense.

The things that I remembered because I've now watched a bunch of episodes and you know, to prepare for this, and things that I had remembered before I watched them were the night the lights went out in Georgia's speech, which was in the second episode, I couldn't believe. I remembered always that Julia would give a fiery speech and take somebody down a couple of notches who needed to be taken down a couple of notches. And I remembered the Anita Hill episode and the and I remembered the T shirts that they had on the he did it and she lied T shirts. That was one of my strongest memories. And also obviously their accents, which are so musical and fun, and you know when the more you hear them, the more you want to start talking like that.

And I also remembered the staircase. Oh, that is a show that very particular production design and a lot of staircases. I don't know if you noticed that the staircase in the Sugar Baker House, and then also that insane circular one at the Governor's man Joe at Suzanne's she has a beautiful staircase, and then I didn't even remember that there was a whole staircase episode at the Governor's mansion, but it's staircases are a theme in that in that show, and that felt like a clearly a little nod to the Southern architecture since they were design and you know, I was I grew up in the South. I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, so I do remember the show being set in Atlanta, like that's one of the I was like, whoa.

And I always liked the idea of designing women, and I remember in general like I loved the actresses. But I was at USC, I was in college at film school when the show came on, and so I only caught it sporadically, like I didn't recognize it as a feminist show to me, because I wasn't necessarily, I was only catching kind of the surface of it when it first came out, and the Delta Burt being such a hot topic very quickly, I remember that, and that felt like the fore front of that show. And even though again it felt funny and smart, the big hair and the southernness of it was actually something that I was in at that time I had left the South. I had, you know, I was sort of like a little bit like, is that really?

I don't know how I feel about that, But in revisiting it, I realized like I should have paid more attention to it. Did it ring true to you at the time of people that you knew, or did it feel like a caricature? It felt like a little bit of both. But it was about a world that was not my South because I was from a little bit of the suburban South, the suburb of Atlanta, and I didn't know an interior designer in my life in the South, so it was of the still genteel like there was. They were kind of riding the line of wanting both of run wanting to sort of honor that genteel southern magazine South, and yet also being feminist and forward and liberal in the new South that was happening too, And that was a conflict in the South that was happening.

I just because I wasn't part of I really was like just not interested in that part of the South. So it was never part of like, oh yeah, the big hair and the big thing and whatever. It always that always felt separate from me. And so I think there was a part of me that sort of was like, hmm, I don't trust this way show to a degree, And but looking back at it, I wish I had appreciated it more. But I don't think I caught it.

Like I just didn't watch it for two years because I was still doing film school and that was very all encompassing, so I sort of would catch it sporadically. Yeah, So it's interesting to me because I'm like, this show is awesome and bonkers. It is bonkers and awesome and very unabashedly feminist, and that's in the height of like some real backlash that was happening. So it's pretty cool. Yeah, and unabashedly political and unabashedly topical.

And you're like, how did this get on this episode? Get on that Anita Hill episode. I just rewatched it because I had remembered it. The one thing I didn't remember was that they had two new cast members. I did not remember that.

And I did not remember that they showed so much of the footage. I mean, that wasn't it was as a time capsule. That episode is amazing, and I just I thought it was really powerful. Well, then there's the The AIDS episode with Tony Goldwin's yes from the first season, I believe. So I want to give some listeners some context to this.

So the Anita Hill episode is from season six, episode eight, I believe, and it really does take on the women are on different sides of the story for what was happening between Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill and the congressional hearings around that and the congressional vote of whether they were going to move forward his nomination to the Supreme Court, and that again was capturing a very I remember not only bits of that episode. I don't remember the T shirts. That was funny that you remember the T shirts, but that nineties time with Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas was one of the things that radicalized me in the nineties and all of us. It riveted the nation. So Anita Hill kind of left without a lot of support, and then she got back to her office and she had all these letters from women all over the country saying that's my experience.

I believe you, I know what you're talking about. In the moment, it was a huge tragedy to a lot of women, But the aftermath was that literally sexual harassment laws got changed and processes got changed because of that moment in history, and women started running for office and it changed a lot of things because it felt like such a travesty. Travesty, Yes, yeah, it really did. It felt like a complete travesty. And now we know it really was a complete travesty.

Well, it's funny, as I'm sure I watched this episode when it aired, but I honestly didn't remember it, and I wonder if it's because I just blocked it out of my mind, because I just thought and still believed the whole thing was a travesty, as I said, And it still ticks me off to no end to this day that that was allowed to happen, that we I'll have Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court and we did it again. Yeah, I know, we did it almost worse. Yeah, it feels like an incredible pushback against women moving forward inequality, And that was the thing that struck me so much about designing women. It was speaking to the time, right, and it's so resonant now almost like so many episodes were incredibly resonant in a depressing way, and they are fifteen that gun control, Yes, like you're like, come on, right, that was nineteen eighty seven, and the speech that she gave was amazing about like that's what those guns are for.

And we're still in that and literally a million times worse that you could pull that speech out now and it would literally be the same speech. I know. The story is is that Suzanne who has a pet pig, which I had forgotten. And it's not a small pig. It's not the cute little celebrity pigs that were happening.

A little pigmy pig. Yeah, but Suzanne buys an ar fifteen Yeah, Season three, episode fifteen, Full Moon. What's funny is because again the big the a story of that to a certain degree is that Julia has accidentally mooned right the fashion show, the Atlanta Fashion Show, which she was asked to walk the catwalk for, and it was such a proud moment until she had her her dress got tucked into her pantyhose and she was not wearing underwear because they had told her not to for the pantelon and so she moons the entire show and they bring it up multiple times in other episodes two, which is pretty funn I do love that sparkly dialogue, super funny concepts yes, a lot of slapstick, yes, and yet also incredibly topical, incredibly personal, incredibly like this is a Linda Bludworth Thomasin's show.

And apparently she wrote all the episodes. That's true, she wrote a lot of them. I don't know that she wrote all of them, because I think there was another there's a couple of names, but she wrote a significant portion of them. Well. I seem to remember hearing that one of the reasons that she wrote the show and said it in Georgia was because she wanted to change the image of women in the South.

And I think that was one of the things when I watched it as it aired originally that I did come away with thinking that, okay, because I didn't live in the South growing up, although both my parents are from New Orleans and there were still a lot of stereotypes about women in the South, and they're here. You have these educated, erudite, you know, really kicking women who are living in Georgia doing their own thing, and it I think it, at least for me anyway, it made me go, okay, it's you have to remember not everybody's the same everywhere you go, as we all should know and should remember. I mean, this show would never get on the air today, you know, tackling similar subjects, tackling well and talk about part like so apparently Linda Bloodworth, Thomas's mother died of AIDS from a blood transfusion in November of nineteen eighty six, and so the I'm trying to see when the episode Tony Goldwin won the Tony Goldwyn which was a season two episode four, killing all the right people, and that they're not only talking about AIDS in that episode, and it really also feels like that show was also imparting information, yes, which felt so vital and important for that time.

And Rich and I were just talking last night about the aid's epidemic and that time and growing up in that time and coming of age in that time, and losing people or knowing people that were lost, and it being such a sort of scary time, it being not, you know, a completely different disease than COVID, but there's that moment where like, we've never gone through this, and you're like, well, we've gone through some things. There was a lot of misinformation in the eighties about AIDS too, and a lot of I remember I was a kid at the time, but I remember there being a theory that like a mosquito bite could give you aids, like that kind of thing, And it gave a lot of people license to be as anti gay as they wanted to be and be upfront about it because of all the misinformation and their choice not to pay attention to the information that was out there about what it was and what it wasn't.

So this is see, it's killing all these people, killing all the right people because they are misbehaving. Is their sinner exactly. And that episode aired October fifth, nineteen eighty seven, so like a year after her mom died, which it felt like such a personal show, which is such an interesting thing to come from a network sitcom in the eighties. Her mother in law also during the run of the show, died of breast cancer and that was and there was that breast cancer Charlot And there was a card at the end of the dedicating it two women and one of them must have been her mother in law and I'm wondering, and the other one must have been her mother. Yeah, And that episode, that killing all the Right people episode was also the one where Mary Joe stepped up at school and made a case for talking to kids about sex and condoms because she didn't want her daughter to die, you know, needlessly, because nobody would tell her she didn't have the right information.

Again, I just it's really one of the recurring themes that we've had, I think in this podcast as we look back on the shows we've talked about, is just how much and how upfront a lot of these shows were at that time in ways that they could not be today. I mean that episode. I don't know that it would that any network would want to touch an episode where you actually have somebody talking about in positive terms about sex education for teenagers. It's I think that would be a a really tough thing for them to do, having those arguments, Like I think, we talk about more things and more sophisticated ways on television now, but it is stunning how unchanged the arguments seem to be, and that there's still this very huge divide about who has rights and who has autonomy, and who also gets to be vulnerable and who gets to be who gets to live, and who has the right to live fully and completely the way they want to without judgment, and that is really.

Yeah. The other so one of the other kind of big episodes for me was season two episode twenty, How Great Thou Art, which is about Charlene, and by the way, I love that she's called Charlene instead of Charlene the way it's spelled. That does feel like a real Southern thing. But Charlene basically decides to leave her church because her pastor says that women can't be pastors can't be pre You think I didn't watch that one. I think I missed that one.

And at the end, Julia gets to sing in the choir and gets to sing this beautiful how Great Thou Art? And so she's been practicing. She really wants to do this solo, but she's nervous and then is like, I can't do the solo, and then decides, well, I'm not going to do it because you're leaving this church. And Charlene says, no, I want you to do it because you should take that and own that song for women in the church. And it's really, really, incredibly beautiful.

And this is going to lead me to my Dixie Carter behind the scenes story that I heard about this, which so Dixie Carter was a Republican. She was conservative, and she was doing these rants that were very liberal. You're blowing my mind right now, I know. And what I read is that she basically said, I'll do these rants, but for every big rant, I get to sing in a later episode. The first part I knew, but that's the second part.

That's great. Good for her, that's great. So they both got what they wanted out of it. As we're talking about all these issue oriented episodes, it is also still just flat out funny. This show just absolutely hilarious, and at the end of the day, of course, that's what we all want when we're watching.

At least that's what I want when I watch a comedy. I wanted to make me laugh, and it definitely did. Just so many moments and issues and it's such a great show. I love it so much. Yeah, the dialogue is like sparkling.

It is like play dialogue. It is just every episode is like a little play, very much so, and a really fun play. And then you have these rants, but you also have such broad physical comedy going on, very lucy and ethel a lot of the stuff. Yeah, that's the perfect thing. It is wacky adventures with the getting your head stuck when they were stuck under the bed.

Under the bed was insane. That was insane, and it was so fun and it was very very goofy, and that's what I love. I think, particularly in the later seasons, it became clear that Julia Mary Joe, that Annie Potts and and Dixie Carter were just going to town. Like which episode had them playing Betty Davis? Right, that was that you need a hill Up?

Which was, Yeah, that that episode is so bonkers. That's what I'm saying, it's bonkers because there's that is so funny. It is hilarious that it's making the comment of like, you look like a crazy person when you try to speak out for women's rights, because she's dressed up as Betty Davis from Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf Baby Jane, one of the Crazy Lady movies, And so it's yeah that I really she gives a rant on the news, the news with her with her Baby Jane makeup about why she's a feminist, and and just the two of them driving around dressed up as Fade done Away and Bennie Davis in the car again just really physical and though John Crawford Dunway played her later in Mommy Dearest. Yes okay, Joan Crawford, thank you Joan Craft, and they made a hangar joke because you're like, but there's so many layers to that.

Yeah. So really did seem in the later seasons that it became clear that it was just put the two of them into the lackiest situations and go, yes, all right, we're gonna have take a break and then we'll come back and I have a little deeper and then talk some more about Maggie. Fantastic, and we're back. My favorite episode is one that I think combines both the funny and the issues, if you will. It's called Reservations for eight.

It's season two, episode twenty two, and all four of our ladies and their significant others go away for the weekend on a for a ski weekend and they're stuck in their cabin because the weather is too bad for them to go out and ski, and they have a knockdown discussion about men and women, and it is fantastic, fantastic. It's the episode I tend to think about whenever I think about this show, because you've got four different couples in different stages of the relationship Charlene and Bill, her fiance, then she eventually marries. They're all in love, yeah, on the show, and they're all in love and they're just sitting over in the corner, really not paying attention what everybody else is talking about.

Julian Reese played by Dixie Carter and her real life husband Hell whole Brook. You've got Delta Burke and Gerald McGraney who play Gerald McGraney plays one of Suzanne's ex husbands. And then you've got Mary Joe and her current boyfriend jd who are also dating. And it's just lovely as they're talking about the war between the sexes as it was often called at that time, about how what women want, what men want, how they see each other differently, and it's pointed, but it's also really hilarious. I just love that episode so much.

And recently I was talked to my mother as we were talking about us starting to talk about designing women on this podcast, and my mother said, oh, yeah, I've got that recorded and saved. I said, so do I that episode? That episode I because I want to have it nearby if I decide I want to watch it some day, if I just need something that makes me laugh. That's so sweet. And what we were just talking about over the break was that in Designing Women, Dixie Carter and Hal Holberg were married and they play a couple on the show for several seasons.

And then Jean Smart met her husband on the show who was playing Annie Potts's boyfriend, J D. Shackelford, and his name is Richard Gilliland. I can never remember exactly how to pronounce it, but that sounds right. Gilliland is how it looks, and he just recently passed. We're losing a lot of people.

But that is really funny that she met her husband on the show playing the boyfriend of another character. And then when Gerald McGraney and Delta Berg were a couple, they were they married at that point. I don't think so, but I'm not one hundred percent she got married during the run of the show. But whether they were married when that episode, I'm not sure. But let's see if we can find out.

And they're still married. Yeah, okay, So one of the episodes we haven't talked about yet was they shoot right that woman, don't they? By the way, That's the thing I also remember most about the show from back then was all of the public scrutiny about Delta Burke's weight and how much flak she took from comedians, and you know, people just made fun of her NonStop. It was terrible. And here's the horrifying thing about watching that show and that episode.

She's not that fat. No, no, she's not fat. No, she's bigger than she was when she started Russ show. I think that there's something about her having been a beauty queen. It's like, if she doesn't maintain a twenty four inch waist forever, then you know she's offending.

I don't know it's that I remember the talk about that episode. I remember the talk about her weight of that time, and I found an article about it from the La Times Blood Word. Thomasin said she avoided writing about Burke's weight because she thought Burke would want it that way. However, the attacks out there had gotten so vulgar and tacky we decided it was time to deal with the issue. Some of the insults Suzanne's classmates.

So Suzanne has to go to a high school reunion, right and people insult her about her weight. When she goes back. Some insults Suzanne classmates offer are culled from real life. For example, at a press event, Burke overheard reporters trying to guess her brass eyes, which happens in the region. I remember that.

But her character is often not self aware at all, and that was a great moment of self awareness and self acceptance. It was, Yeah, it was really beautiful. Yeah. So once again, I think it's so interesting that they're writing to the actresses on the show, in this show, that they're clearly writing to things that are important to Linda Bloodworth Thomason, and they're writing to the times. There's a tie between Maud and All in the Family and this show, as well as like workplace comedies like Taxi or you know, and and Golden Girls, which it feels like they're the probably not on purpose, but the women in the Golden Girls, do you notice that like b Arthur is Julia Sugar Baker, and Charlene is Rose and like you they they all have they all they they're similar in a lot of trope.

And we learned some of this. We did it. We did an episode on It's a Living I loved that show growing up, and Drew Greenberg and Jane Espinson talked about the female friendship trope. Of the four women, there's the sweet, naive girl, the tom boyish one, the sexy one, and the kind of leader, the matriarch, the smart one, sort of the mom one, and they're like, you can look at almost any wow for social show and you can break the characters down in that way often. Yeah, And Gillian was the sexy one on its living and the redhead I can't remember her name.

She was the leader, the leader of the smart one, the kind of in charge. Oh my god, I think about that show every time I'm in downtown LA and I see that building and I start singing the theme song. You know what a fun show that was. And every season it sort of came back with a slightly different cast. Yes, I remember that and stuff, which this show did too.

So it was five seasons with the original cast, and then in season six, Delta Brook leaves kind of famously apparently maybe a little bit of a she's fired or she's not fired, or she wanted more money and doesn't get more money because I think the contracts went for five years, you know, and so she wanted more money because she was a breakout star, even though they were all kind of breakout stars of that show. But she leaves as well as Jeane Smart. Yeah, and so they bring on Jan Hooks, Jan Hooks and Julia Duffy. Julia Duffy from New Heart. Oh yeah, I remember, wasn't she She was with Peter Scalari.

Yeah show. Yes, they played yuppies. Yes, yes, I love them. I loved Peter. Oh me too, wasn't but I the first show I ever saw filmed.

I came out to go to USC in nineteen eighty four and the you know friends we knew that lived out here in Orange County were like, We're gonna go see a taping of a show. And we went to see New Heart at the show, and Peter Scalari was in the cast and came up and talked to people afterwards, and I stayed to talk to him nice because I was like, and it was just so amazing, Like it was in one of those amazing like Oh my god, my whole life in la is going to be like this, seeing stars being on studio and chat it up, and it's just going to be this is going to be every day for the rest of my life. It was not, but that moment in time I got to have that beautiful moment and he was very sweet. I actually went to a taping of Designing Women Oy.

Yeah, we didn't bury the lead well, because I can't remember which episode it was. I do believe though, that it was during the end of the fifth season, because in the back of my mind there were all these stories swirling about Delta Burke leaving the show. Is she leaving the show? Is she not leaving the show? But I don't remember which episode it was.

What do you remember? I remember the set, I remember. I think Delta Burke was wearing this blue suit dress. I don't remember, but I don't I remember nothing specific about what the episode was about, if there was a guest star, who was who was guest star? I just know that I went, which drives me absolutely crazy that I can't remember any more than that.

Someday, hopefully i'll remember, it'll come back. I can't remember the episode of New Heart, but I remember every other moment of that night. The beautiful lot, my favorite lot in the world, which is in studio city is Radford, CBS Radford. My first job, yeah, was at CBS Radford. Well, so we're standing in line to go into the studio.

This is my little like beautiful night, the whole beautiful night. And I'm like, oh, we're gonna go see we're sitting out on the studios, so cute. And this guy walks out of the studio, says goodbye to the guard, puts on a backpack and starts jogging down the street. And about midway through him putting on the backpack, I'm like, that's Mark Harmon, No from sint Elsewhere, like the sexy one from sant Elsewhere, And nobody else noticed, and I'm just watching him and it's like me and my moment with with Mark Harmon so cool. It was so cool, and I'm like, again, my whole life is going to be like this.

This is day two in la And then we walk in and we go see the new Heart, I meet Peter's Gallori. I'm like, every moment, right, every hour, I'll be seeing someone. And then I stayed late and everybody else was bored because it took a long time watching those as it comes to be filmed, and so they were like, we'll meet you back of the car, so that by the time I left, nobody else was on the lot. There was no security. I walked out.

I'm literally standing alone in this little lot and I'm like, ohh and so I just start wandering around the line. I could have night at the museumed I couldn't have gone into the museum, different studios. I ended up on the steps of Saint Elusius Nice, the outdoor set of St. Elsewhere, and I'm like, I'm standing on the sete of Saint Elsewhere. I just met Peter's Gallori.

I just saw Mark Harmon. This will be my life. And then I walked back to the cars and then I got into a different life, which was fine and good and all that great stuff. But it was a very magical night, and I remember every moment of the night. I do not remember the episode that well.

That was secondary to everything else that happened. It was pretty secondary. You were just thinking about Mark Harmon the whole time, a little bit Mark Carmon until Peter Scalaria walks out. He's more my like, you know, he's a little more my type. If you've met Richard Adam, you know, funny, I sweeter, more than like sexy.

I mean, listen, you know who doesn't like it? But not Mark Harmon? Not okay again, just Okay, stop taking You're right, I'll stop now. He is awesome, so is Richard Adam. Speaking of It's a Living and going to see sitcoms, the only sitcom I've ever been to a taping of was when I first started in film school.

I went to see one of the very last tapings of the show Wings with Crystal Bernard. She was one of the later pasts of Its Living anyways, right, very random. I loved Wings. I did too, Yeah, I just my sister was visiting me. I just, you know, moved out here, and so we were like, we have to go see a sitcom taping.

That was the one we went to. I also went to two Murphy Brown tapings. Oh that's pretty cool man. The first one I don't remember. My mother was in town.

We went together. The second one I absolutely remember because it was the baby shower for Murphy and all these newswomen were guest stars on the show. And the reason I think I remembered is because during one of the breaks, they let some of the folks in the stands go to the restroom and I'm standing in line as you always do at the women's room with Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer. Was she there. I don't know if Diane Story was there, but the female anchor on GMA, Joe London.

Yes, And I'm just like like you, I'm like, oh my god, everybody's here. That's pretty cool. I'm standing in the right line. So I'm speaking of Murphy Brown. And you know our other boyfriend, or their eighties boyfriend, Scott Bacula.

Oh yeah, I believe that when I saw him. Oh my god, I'm playing a real jerk. Yeah. Yeah. And you guys invoked his name numerous times when you were talking about Remington Steele and I don't remember why.

We were probably Star Trek. Yeah, Star Trek. Yeah, yeah, yeah, YB and I both worked on Star Trek at the same time, even though we didn't meet each other. Oh how crazy. Yeah.

And of course at any time, you know, it's just Scot Vaculate. He's come in in uh perod times. Well, yeah, Murphy Brown. You know, he's a real eighties guy. Yeh, show up.

Yeah. Melissa worked in camera for twenty Awesome. In the pilot, he's he's Annie Pontz's ex husband, ex husband, but like Delta, Brooke starts dating, right. That's the pilots to see him as a gynecologist and they end up dating. Yeah, yeah, and she's even thinking that she's going to marry him.

But then season one, episode one gone, and I don't think I ever got the feeling of Scott Bacula in that role of Mary Joe's ex husband, of him being the cad that she described. I don't know if it was the Scott back. It must have been him, but because they didn't spend a lot of time I don't think writing the character. It was just we were just supposed to know he treated her badly and she, you know, we're not supposed to like him. And I remember thinking, even when I watched it, I don't know, it doesn't seem so bad.

Well he's so dunk cute, but not as cute as Richard had him. Yeah, so he he does a second episode, Yeah, yeah, because he he was in more than one episode that I watched. Yeah, he was in several episodes. She's trying to date, somebody shows up, Yeah, and then he's a little more You're like, Okay, this guy's being jerky, right, He's trying to like get in between their relationship. So Linda Bludworth Thomason.

She had created Filthy Rich, the inheritors that all have to live in the house together to try to get the inheritance. It's called Filthy Rich. Oh, I don't know them. And it was precursor to this, but it starred Dixie Carter and Delta Burke. So I do want to also talk about that.

In nineteen ninety five, there was sort of a sequel to this show called Women of the House. It ran for a season and Susanne sugar Baker goes to Congress when her husband passes away and she takes his seat. Why don't I remember this? I may know either, you're like and so so Delzeberg came back and worked with and worked with her again. It's about this woman in Congress, who's you know she's she's playing Susanne sugar Baker.

Her fifth husband has passed away. In designing women, she's had three husbands, I believe. All right, So any other episodes we've got to talk about. Okay, good, because we're going to get back and talk about Maggie because I was reminding myself of Witches Bestend, which we talked about a little bit. Yeah, because there are four women on that show.

Yes, Oh my god, do they fit into the True Sisters Freya yeahl by Jenna Tatum, well, well no longer Tatum Yes. And Ingrid Ingrid Rachel Boston Yeah. And their mom yep, Joanna yep played by Julia Ormon. Yeah, of course. And Aunt Wendy Yeah.

So talk about making that show and who did you make a four female? Well, you know what's funny is it's based on a book and it in the book there's only three of them. And I invented the character of Aunt Wendy partly because which is the Machen name it character. I wrote her into the pilot because I wanted to kill a character in the pilot to show that the world had real that this show had real life and death danger to these witchy women and that their powers could do them harm. And so Machen was so good that we could not keep her dead.

She had to come back to life in the second episode and become a regular character because she just she's she's just amazing. And the chemistry I think that having the sort of the parent generation, the aunt and the mom, and then the younger generation playing off each other in different combinations, it just worked as like a family unit. I think so, but originally it was three. But you know, now that you're telling me about these tropes, I'm like, oh boy, you know the sexy one, the sexy one which was which was well, it was a little bit of both Machen and Jenna really because Jenna was supposed to be sort of like a goddess of love. Although I guess, hm, the Julia Ormond character is definitely the leader, you know, and I guess the sort of naive one would have been Ingrid Rachel Boston.

But then what were the other two tropes? There was a tom boyish one, which again and they sort of can shift a little. Yeah, right, so because sometimes you're tom boyish one is your naive one, yes, which would which I would say would would be I don't know if Rachel was was tom boyish, but she was. She was less sexy, right, she was. She she literally like worked in a library.

Yeah, you know, she was the nerdy one, yes, the one that studied. Yeah. Yes, But then we went and saw one of her past lives where you know, she was in some kind of crazy sex cult. So but we won't talk about that right now anyway, Yeah, I guess it kind of holds true. I was unaware at the time and I was writing it, but yeah, women are the leads on that show, and they're the really powerful ones.

Yeah. Yeah, It's like I always thought that witches for women are what superheroes are for men. Now I know women also like superheroes, and there are female superheroes. But for me growing up, like whenever I was sick home from school, there would be reruns playing on the TV all day, and you know, I loved the TV and so Bewitched. You know, it's before my time, but they would play it in the eighties and I just was obsessed and I wanted to be a witch.

I think we all wanted to be a witch because how cool is that? Yeah, do what you want, have what you want. Answer. Yeah, It's very powerful and very feminine at the same time. So so is designing women really feminist and is it progressive?

I think definitely for the time and now I think for both. Actually, I'm not sure we've ever seen characters, especially like Julia sugar Baker, or shows that will happily take on issues of the day. So I definitely think it is. And again, feminism is not one thing. It's a it's across the board.

Women, women of all types can be feminist, and I think they all were in their own way. So yeah, I think it definitely is. Yeah, I'm going to say I think the show was feminist for its time for sure. Progressive, yes, in terms of the topicality, like and you know, we didn't really talk about Anthony that much as a character on the show. Black character on the show in the South, one black character, but who becomes more and more part of that family and gets his own stories over the course of the seasons.

And so I would say that it didn't have a huge diverse representation With Anthony, they didn't shy away from and it didn't shy away from talking about it again and yet very gently comparatively to the other stuff it was. It was side stuff, but it wasn't about him. The show was about the designing women, not the unfortunately incarcerated delivery guy me Suck Taylor, who was fantastic and who gets to do more. He gets to sing later in later episodes. And yeah, and in the last season in the opening, he's finally in the opening, I mean he's at the piano with all four women and Rachel.

Oh, we didn't talk about the opening, So the openings yet again, you know George on my Mind and the first five season are instrumental versions of it. And I saw in the credits that it was Doc Severnson with the trumpet and the horn version, and for those that don't know, he was the band leader of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. And then seasons two and three are this sort of jazzy version. So here's the weird thing. So on Amazon, I'm just gonna shout out how poorly some of the Amazon seasons are.

Season three, many of the episodes have thirty seconds of tone and bars. Shut up. Really, I watched it on Hulu. It was not like that, Yeah, thirty seconds of the slate. Wow?

What That's kind of neat though, but it's a little bit crazy when you're like, wait, what's happening? Then it goes on and on. I'm like, how long is this going on? I took a video of it. I couldn't believe it.

I don't know if it was the original video tape or film or whatever they shot it on, or if it was the transfer to what we're watching on the streaming, but it just was not very critic it was not very crisp, and it was apparently shot on film, at least the early season. I feel like it could have. I've seen other things that are old like that, and that'd be better. Yeah, so there's a DVD release too. I bet it looks better on DVD.

Yeah, I'm fascinated by those openings. But I really love the opening of season six, which is Ray Charles playing the piano and all of them standing around the piano while he sings George on my Mind. They're all in like evening guals. It succeedo and it's very cool. That one's really great.

Yeah. I really was like, that's great. And why did it take six seasons for them to do that? I don't know that. I don't know.

Maybe they were trying to like spruce it up because they had the new cast, so they wanted to say like, hey, we're still like really cool and awesome. Well, and we didn't also talk about the cast changes again for season seven, Julia Duffy leaves and who comes in for her Judith Ivy. Oh right, yeah, seasons seven, season seven. Sorry, Yeah, I love I do too. Yeah, I love Juliu Duvey.

Yeah, but those characters really do, you know, it's hard for them not to feel secondary. And one of them is called Carlene. Yes, she's supposed to be Charlene's sister, becoming all of Charlene's sister's names sound they are a variation of that. Charlene. Yeah, Darling, Harlen chan Hooks.

She's hilarious, she's very funny, just like it's but at the same time, you're just you're so missing. Yeah, it's not the same. They really does feel like all your best friends left. It's not fair to jan Hooks to have to step into those shoes. No, not at all, not at all.

But all right, so we're back to you. So your Netflix show, Yeahleene. Yeah, and it's sort of apt for eighties TV ladies because a lot of it takes place in the eighties and they work in television. I love that. That's right.

It starts in the seventies, so kids, right, it's I mean, it's it takes place in multiple time periods. It's a non linear narrative, so we're telling all these different stories at once. But yeah, it's about these two girls who meet in the seventies when they're like fourteen and they become best friends, and we see we follow their story in the seventies as they like navigate high school and coming of age, and then we also see them in the eighties they're working in TV news, local news in Seattle, and then we see them in the two thousands when they're kind of in their forties and dealing with what it's like to be in your forties. And we do jump to the nineties in a few different episodes as well.

But yeah, there's a lot a lot of eighties stuff in the show, and they're working in television, yeah, together in the part and stuff. So yeah. Stars Catherine Heigel and Sarah Chock. Yes, great show. Thanks love it a look the cast I love they're so good.

Yeah. Yeah, how did it come about? Well, I had a meeting. My agent, Nancy, who I mentioned earlier, sent me up on a meeting with this woman named Stephanie Germaine who had the book, and so I went to lunch with her and she this was in twenty eighteen. She handed me the book and I had not read it, but I looked at the back, you know, I read the little blurb on the back and I was like, oh, this sounds right.

Up my alley because it reminded me of so many things that I love, so many stories that I've loved, you know, and I love female friendship stories and coming of age. But I was also really interested in, because I'm in my forties, what is it like to be in your forties? And and I really wanted I just I loved the whole, just all of that. I thought it was a really beautiful story. And so we went and pitched it to Netflix and they bought it.

And so I wrote the pilot in twenty eighteen and they picked it up, and then you know, we started the writer's room in twenty nineteen and we made a season. We finished the first season. We finished shooting it in January of twenty twenty, just before COVID, Like I remember, there was like news about like, oh, there's this crazy thing happening, this virus, and then yeah, and then so we made season. So season one aired and they picked us up for a second season. And I when I had pitched it, I pitched them three seasons.

I knew where the story ended and how you know, what I wanted to tell. So they picked up a second season and they picked us up for ten episodes, and I was I kept having flashbacks to which is of East End and how we didn't get to finish, and I was very worried that for whatever reason, we wouldn't get to tell the whole story. So I went to them and I said, could you just pick up seasons two and three because I know exactly where the story ends, and they said, they came back to me. Johnny Johnny Chu, who's my executive there, who's the best? He came back and he said, look what if we just do a really long season two and so that's that's supersized and tells all the stories that you want to tell and you get to get to the end.

And I was like, sold, I'll do it. So we ended up so now season two, Part one has the first nine episodes of season two, and then part two has the last seven episodes, and you know, the last seven are I think our best ones. I'm very proud of the show, and it was really hard to make. The sixteen episodes of season two were it was so challenging with the COVID and the there was an atmospheric river up in Vancouver when we were shooting, so anytime we wanted to we had seen set outside the weather would not you know, cooperate, so we ended up having to. It was just it was It was tough, but the actors are so amazing and the writers.

I love all the writers on the show, and we just we had a lot of fun, even though we had to have a zoom writer's room, which is not ideal because you miss being like we are right now in a room talking to people. But it was I can't complain. I love making the show and I'm really proud of it, and I'm really happy that we got to end it on our own terms and choose how the like that the story is complete, which you don't. Oh, I've been on plenty of shows where you're just you got your fingers crossed, like, oh, I hope we get to come back. We knew exactly what we were doing and we got to kind of land that plane, which was awesome.

So we made sixteen and I still have like, for whatever reason, the Facebook algorithm sends me things about people wanting to resurrect, which is a vast end, and people being mad that it ended the way did. This was in twenty fourteen. You know that show had a falloway. It really did very passionate following, and so it is it just like pains me that we didn't get to finish that story. So I was not going to let that happen to me again.

Oh my god, it has been so great to have you on. Thanks guys, it's really fun. Oh my god, we might have to have you back on. We get Annie Potts. Can we have you back on?

Oh my god? Yes? And and I made a show. Did I say this? Did I say we were saying this?

Yes? Tell us about okay, fifteen years just real quick. Fifteen years ago I did a pilot for the CW and it was about a young witch living in New York. It was like Sex and the City, but she's a witch and she's like, you know, trying to figure out her life. It was sort of like a dramedy.

But Annie Potts uh is in the We made a pilot and did not make it to air, sadly, but it was directed by Jim Frawley, who directed the pilot of Allan McBeal and also directed them uppet movie Hello. But it had Annie Potts playing the mom of the witch, and she could not have been like cooler, funnier, more delightful. I loved her, and it also had Justin Hartley, who's from This is Us. This is Us, which is pretty cool. He was he was also very cool before he was big, and he's still cool.

Actress oh Lauren Bitner, who she was great. I uh yeah, it was a really and actually that's the show on which I met Becky Hartman Edwards. We were paired up because I was sort of a little bit too much of a newbie to be the showrunner on my own, so they paired me up with this writer named Becky Hartman Edwards, who I'm still very good friends with, and she uh worked on Firefly Lane, So I love that. Yeah, I love when you're when you sort of circle back to the people. Yes, well, I tried to hire her on multiple shows and I couldn't get her after this, after the one where we met, and then I finally was able to nab her, and she was a COEP and a writer and producer.

She's fantastic. Well, I'm sorry the television gods didn't let us see the show because it sounds like it would have been great. It was really fun. It was a fun show, all right. Well, I can't wait for what you do next.

And I'm thoroughly enjoying fireflyline. We've been having a blast because I love the seventies stuff right because it's yeah, me too, that stuff is really fun. Yeah. Yeah, it's beautifully beautifully done on leek. You enjoy it immensely and enjoy you, and thank you for coming on the show.

Really appreciate it. Thank you, And now it's time for today's audioography. The Designing Women fan website can be found at designing Women online dot com. It's fantastic and you can stream the show on Amazon Prime, also Hulu, Apple TV, so you can find this show pretty much everywhere. It's free on Pluto right now.

But when we went to watch it on Pluto, they were only like select episodes available. It doesn't have the entire series. So as we wrap up today's episode, thank you for listening to Eighties TV Ladies. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or on your favorite podcast platform. We're on all of them.

Search Eighties TV Ladies and tell your friends. And speaking of friends, I want to shout out Chris Stashue and Chris and Mike White at weirding Way Media, where you can find this podcast and theirs the Culture Cast and The Projection Booth, along with many other very cool podcasts on the weirding Way media network. And shout out to our other podcasting friends, Forrest and Scott from Astonishing Legends, Angela Ross at so Cal Voices, Cynthia b Miss Abrams at Advanced TV Herstory, and Dana Carter at Hello My Name is Dana. Check out their podcast to be sure to tune in for our next episode, where we continue our Designing Women discussion. We want to hear from you.

What are your favorite Designing Women episodes? Tell us on the website or on social media. We hope Eighties TV Ladies brings you joy and laughter and lots of fabulous new and old shows to watch, all of which will lead us forward toward becoming amazing ladies of the twenty first century. That's the night lights went out in Georgia, so pretty through the city, worl