Welcome to Season 2: Advanced TV Herstory w/Cynthia Bemis Abrams, Part 1

Welcome to Eighties TV Ladies, part of the weirding Way Media network Babies So Pretty Hello. I'm Susan Lambert Haddam and I'm Sharon Johnson. Welcome to Eighties TV Ladies, where we explore female driven television shows from the nineteen eighties and celebrate the people who made them. Last season, we looked at Cagney and Lacy Scarecrow and Missus King and Remington Steele. This season, we wanted to explore more comedies and half hour ladies driven sitcoms, and we want to look at more diverse shows this season.

Our first season was very homogeneous, as Serta from Nineties TV Babies put it, more white ladies doing white lady things. Today, we'll be talking about out what shows we're going to be talking about this season, just a little something to talk about. We're also going to be getting a little advanced eighties TV herstory. We want to give you a sampling of some of these shows, kind of like a wine tasting only for eighties television. Indeed, on future episodes this season, we'll be looking at the following shows, not necessarily in this order.

The Cosby Show spinoff A Different World starring Lisa Bonet, Jasmine Guy and Kadeem Hardison. Designing Women starring Dixie Carter, Delta Burke, Annie Potts, Jane Smart and Mesak Taylor. Two two seven, a spinoff of The Jeffersons which starred Marla Gibbs, Hal Williams and Regina King. And we want to look at a sitcom that was called both It's a Living and also returned in Syndicasion as Making a Living. It starred so many eighties TV ladies, including a Jillian Barry Young Fellow and Amy winner Cheryl Lee Ralph from Abbat Elementary.

We're so excited to take a look at these shows. Some of these show suggestions came from you, our listeners, so keep them coming. Go to Eighties tv Ladies dot com and tell us what shows or ladies we should be talking about. But we need a little framing for this season, so we brought on a special guest today to kick us off and give us a little bit of advanced eighties TV ladies. Her story.

You know, Sharon, I found this guest because I was on the search to find other podcast like us, to make sure we weren't the only unicorn in the sea, or that lonely whale, the fifty two hurts whale that's crying out to find any other whale like it. Just a metaphor for the awesome loneliness of our lives. But we're not alone. I found Advanced TV Her Story, a podcast by Cynthia V. Miss Abrams.

She has been looking at women in television history for one hundred and forty episodes. That's amazing. I know, right, she's way more advanced than us. We're just babies. So we had to get her on the show.

Let's Go. In June of twenty fifteen, a far more innocent time, Cynthia embarked on bringing the backstories of women in and of television to audio with her podcast, Advanced TV Hestory. Her episodes connect the dots of television and feminism to American culture and politics. Advanced TV Hestory has built a vital history unmatched and podcasting. Cynthia herself has a distinguished career in public relations and leadership consulting.

In fact, it was teaching a leadership class of undergraduates that featured a look at the language and wardrobe of TV's designing women that led her to realize there's a lot to be learned from television, so she took her passion and made it happen with a podcast. I love that. So welcome to Eighties TV Ladies, Cynthia Bemis Abrams. Thank you for joining us, Thanks for having me. We really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today.

Oh, I appreciate always having the chance to talk about TV and eighties TV and the women of eighties TV. So it's it's an honor to be here and dig into some of the subject matter that you guys a lot as much as I do. Well, very excited and again we're ready to get our advanced degree right now today. So to that end, if you wouldn't mind tell us about your decision too, and the process you went through to create Advanced TV hestory, well, thank you. It's it's a fairly simple story.

Actually, I was at a point in my life where I knew I had extra time. My kids had gone off to college, we had just recently had some old people in the family die, and you know, there just gets a point where you all of a sudden have time time to explore what you really understood to be passion. And I found a picture of what had been my office air quotes office when I was eight, nine, ten years old, and the piles of Verona Barrett magazine, and so the whole love of TV had always been there, and I still have many of my Rowna Barratts as well as others I've collected through the years. And I thought about the lessons, the lessons and some conversations I had with my kids and in the class that I had been teaching, really realized that the eighties, well at all of TV has a special role in our lives as women, as American women, worldwide women actually when you realize the tremendous power TV has and an area of feminism that is evolving and needs to continue to be explored.

And so rather than write a blog, which somebody would have done six or seven or eight years ago, I decided, oh, I can write script. I can talk into a microphone. And so that's kind of where it started. It is called advanced TV heistory, and it is trademarked by the way, because I kind of thought it would be structured in a sense like lessons that my likely audience was probably the only people who were listening to podcasts seven years ago were you know gen gen Zars, millennials, maybe some Gen xers, and that I would try to dig deep into TV either that they barely knew of or didn't quite understand the context of, and then it's just tend to be balked. Since well, this baby boomer has been listening to podcasts for over ten years.

I don't remember exactly how I got started, but I've been completely hooked on podcast ever since. Then. When you were mentioning about eighties TV, what was it about that decade in particular for you that you felt that that was some place to kind of start, Well, I don't know. If you started with ades TV, you cover everything. I Yeah, I have tried really hard.

I had a very old school sort of grid out in terms of trying to dig out the stories that both I felt passionate about but also that it hadn't been covered. And six and seven years ago there weren't necessarily even the podcasts we have today with the Office Ladies and lots of fan driven where it's a series Buffy the Vampire, there are going to be series that I will never ever touch because I know that the fans already have that covered or the shows had them covered already. I did feel like I needed to do a certain amount with Mary Tyler Moore because she was essential, and found my way through Jennifercation Armstrong, who wrote the Mary Lou Grant, a book on it was really great behind the scenes book.

I knew that Cagney and Lacy at some point would need to get covered, and I didn't. I was so early in it that and I knew that it was such a seminal show. It is so important for so many reasons, and I never quite knew how to dig into it. So I did cover it in a few ways, and so when I was approaching the eighties, I think the biggest first episode I did was about the eighties moneyed matriarchs, which was talking about Jane Wyman in Falcon Crest and Barbara Bell Getties in Dallas, and they were considered senior at the time. I have no idea how old they really were, probably forty five.

And then you had Angela Landsberry roll forward with yet a different kind of trauma, and these are these are legends, These were TV legends. These were older women who were allowed to have power, and that was really important for the eighties. That is so interesting we haven't looked at those yet, the you know and Dynasty I look as part of that. But I'm really excited when we get to get to them to look at that because, like you're saying, it's powerful women and Falcon Chrest has come up a lot. It's been called out by some of our guests as a show they remember particularly because of her.

They remember her, and I think she was of that particular genre in the eighties. Her character was probably the most powerful of the women matriarchs of those various shows for a number of reasons. Yeah, yeah, I watch a lot of TV. Yeah, Sharon's like the best consumer I know, television podcasts. That's why Swasher's on the show.

I mean you if you're gonna try to explain the importance of shoulder pads, and I think we are all sort of love the same, We're within a couple of years age of each other. All shoulder pads are really important. There really is a power component to shoulder pads as there is to hair, and that was something that in the eighties women needed to grasp how to show up at the powerful moment looking their best. If they looked their best, then it was pretty well understood that they had their stuff together. Yeah, and then that rolls over to Julius sugar Baker in Designing Women, where she far more so than anybody else in that show, had the wardrobe that was the power wardrobe.

And so it's worth an entire episode, I think to just focus in on what and why they had Angela Lansbury's wardrobe look the way it did, and Jane Wyman's and Barbara Bugetti's and oh my god, to do the wardrobe person for Designing Women would be fabulous and even a different world because wardrobe was really important and retail, as we've seen now, retail it is a very fragile industry. Yeah, well, and we are very excited, I mean obviously about the wardrobe. We got to talk with the woman that played Francine Martha Smith, the actress on Scarecromiss King, and she talked a lot about basically trying to reign her wardrobe in a little bit because she felt that even though it was powerful, it was not necessarily a working woman's wardrobe for an agent.

But no one would listen to her because they wanted Francine eight right, and because she was a woman who had an opinion about what should happen to her character. But so I want to back up just a little bit and talk about a little more about your podcast and when you started, and kind of what why you think representation is so important, Like why is it vital what happens when we see women? I mean, that's that is a question that I really believe is being asked much more frequently than it was seven years ago. I was stumbling over the words representation to try to help people, particularly women, white women, understand it. I think it is much more.

It was more understood even eight and ten years ago by people of color because they it's what they talked about who isn't in this series, But white women baby boomers were raised to be happy to be at the table. I get into trouble sometimes when I say this stuff happy to be and things like that, But it was it was a very different time for feminism, and so I'm a very end baby blom. What I remember saying and realizing was how important women's tennis was for me. Yes, Charlie's Angels, because in my mind, Charlie's Angels was not nearly as sexualized as evidently the rest of the world thought. It was.

I saw it as three women who, for the most part were catching the bad guy without a man interceding for them. And that was the you know, the Pepper Anderson and Policewoman was immediate. It was kind of what you'd consider immediately before. Yeah, Charlie's Angels, and Barney Rosenswidge was a part of that. Bless his heart, he opened some very important doors.

Barney Rosenswyge Dove Kay named Lacy. So it was somewhere in the Charlie's Angels and the Tennis thing where if they can play tennis, I can play tennis. And I played tennis, and I played, and I played, and that's who I wanted to be. I wanted to be that. And it took me a long time of sort of just stumbling my way through life and careers and do these and obligations to realize just what a powerful impression that had made for me.

That was totally lost, just totally lost in my life. I did not celebrate those performances, those games, those matches that were played that even the women's golf don't get me talking about Dinah Shore. I thought all of this is really important and I could be that and I spent a certain amount of my life with men as gatekeepers who did not want me to be that and who didn't want to open a door the way that Barney Rosenswig did for some man. Yes, I mean I think that we see that with a lot. I think of our generation, and we maybe sort of have a span of generation here, But I think it's so different, mostly because a lot a lot of the gatekeepers for everybody, they're still there, but their power in some ways has diminished because of the ability to communicate in so many different facets of our lives information that we didn't have at our fingertips and we do now, and it can be used for both good and evil, But you kind of can't put the information back in the box that everybody can now access.

I agree with that one hundred percent. And as we think about all too often today, people are looking for the opportunity to become polarized and to not want to listen to somebody else, and we've lost the ability to have good conversations where people find things in common. And so what I often recommend at the end of episodes is, particularly if it involves a series from the sixties or seventies or now even eighties. Is when you are struggling at the Thanksgiving daytable or at a family function to find something in common with the older person who perhaps is you know, become a little isolated with how they receive information. Ask them what was their favorite TV show from the sixties or seventies and why, And more often than not, if it's a woman, she's going to tell you perhaps that Girl or Mary Tyler Moore or Murder she wrote or something, And then you ask why again, and you just keep asking why, and pretty soon they have given you their definition of representation.

I think that's brilliant. I think that's great. Television is so particularly, you know, if you keep going back, Television was the medium where people had a shared view of American society exactly and events. You couldn't run from it. And the next morning at the water cooler, that's what everybody was talking about.

And that was also one of the advantages of a world with just three television networks because there was more of a sense of community because more people were watching the same things than now. And yes, it's great now to have the opportunity to watch a whole swath of things, but it does sort of fracture the ability to say to somebody, have you seen such and such? They probably are watched it, they may not have even heard of it. But for that era, that sort of water coolerness of tele vision could be really helpful in stimulating conversation. And I love the idea of using it to stimulate conversation because you know, everybody watched All in the Family, and that's you know of a certain era Mary Tyler Moore and All in the Family, and the Jefferson's watched by everyone or maud or yeah, yeah, even w KRP and Cincinnati.

You just get you find that common part and and people feel good. And that's I think. The more we can find an opportunity where there's a fond memory that then sort of eases people's defenses, they're going to realize that we really are all in this together. And yeah, and by god, sometimes you don't know that turkeys can't form Hichai rodogas for those not in the know, that's a WKRP reference or less. Nasman, they arguably the best episode, the most remembered episode of w KRAP.

Yeah I wk in Cincinnati. I amist always seek that out on Thanksgiving because you just have to. It's it's just it's so classic. All right, you guys go look it up. We're gonna put it in the audiography, you know.

The other asset or I think the other very good thing that happened in the late seventies and into the eighties was that we had TV series that were not just set in La or New York, but Cincinnati being one, Minneapolis, Denver, Colorado. As we were talking a little bit offline about Dynasty, Dallas, Texas, not Landing, I mean, it just it was there were other places, which was a reminder that life went on in places other than what we considered to be the coasts, right, And that's really fascinating. So you're in Minneapolis, which we also just talked about a little bit in my dream world. You moved there for Mary time of the more inspired. Well, I've actually I lived here for the first fifty some years of my life, and then we were in Chicago for six years, and now come back, and it feels good to be back.

I live about a mile from the Mary Tyler Moore house, and I will I will send you a picture of where not only of her house, but you can see online, but then also where she was when she's washing the car, and then they kind of do that little panorama of a very small skyline. Yes, yeah, oh that'd be so great. Okay, yes, that would be fantastic. We want that. We'll have it on the website.

There's also a sculpture. TV Land did a sculpture as well by Navy Peer of Bob Newhart sitting on a couch and so you can go sit and have your you know, have your picture taken with Bob Newhart. And in Minneapolis, you know Mary, they have a Mary tossing her tam Oh my god, a hail Mary as it were, it is. Oh my, I'm so excited about all this, as my husband will be. I mean, this podcast started because during pandemic we started watching seventies and thees TV, not an unusual thing for us to do because my husband's a TV writer and producer and we met over television shows in some ways.

And literally it was all of New Heart into the next New Heart Show, and then Mary Tyler Moore, and then we got into the eighties and then I started having questions and I was like, there should be a podcast, and as just by coincidence, I watched a couple of Mary Tyler Moore episodes yesterday. I hadn't watched in a long time, but they popped up and while I was doing housework and stuff, I had it on and it was really great to walk back and take another look back at those shows that do you remember the episodes that you there? Both were in season seven. The first one had to do with Sue Anne getting fired and Lou trying to coerce Mary into hiring her and Mary didn't want to do it. No, Well, Lou basically said, you now have a responsibility for hiring and firing, and Mary's like, oh, that's great, and he says, by the way, su Anne wants a job, it's up to you.

I love that. And then the second episode, Gordy played by John Amos, hadn't been on the show since first season, and he came back to visit the station and he was about to go off and do a network talk show, and Ted was trying to get a job as his co host on that show. That's great. Betty white Man and just Betty Ford and Betty Ford and Betty Ford, everybody was on that show. Holy crap, that's a great all right, sorry, we all those young people out there and just go watch Mary Tyler Moore.

Just do yourself a favor. Yea. The two episodes that I watched didn't feel at all anachronistic. It was just about people and relationships and it could happen today and it's very appropriate. We were talking about Mary Tyler Moore on anything regarding TV and women because those showrunners were so committed to having women writers.

So that was really the that was the series, and that launched a lot of different careers that you know, They all of these women went off to write in other shows and become really credible in their own roles. So that access and someone making a choice which they did in Marritime, the more to seek out and lift up female writers and then let them move up. Because I was doing a little research on Cagney and Lacy recently, because you know, Cagney Lacy, and I was curious if it affected the number of women who went into the police force, like Tom Cruise, like like the first top gun you know, basically was a ad for the Air Force the Navy. Sorry, okay, yeah see I got that's where I am not a military I'm an Air Force brat and my brother went to the Naval Academy, so I have a little bit more information.

And I know air force and Navy are very not the same thing. It's not the same thing. And what's interesting is the Navy flies off aircraft carriers, correct, and so did Cagney and Lacy. I haven't found the answer. I know, I haven't found the answer yet, but I did pull up a nineteen eighty four report from the NYPD where they talked about diversity.

From nineteen seventy six to nineteen eighty four, there being a significant bump both in women and minorities, and they were purposely trying to make their police force look like their city and it sort of worked. But what was interesting was to find out that women weren't promoted well. In parallel to Cagney and Lacey was Hill Street Blues nineteen eighty one to nineteen eighty seven, and there you had Betty Thomas as one of the very few women in uniform depicted as a police officer. And I believe when I did that episode, I did find something that said that her presence and this was you know, they toward the end of the series, there was a blip in women entering the police academies in some cities, I'm not sure what it was.

And then of course you had the Joy Stavenport character played by not helping ladies drown a blank Frona Yes, Veronica, Yes, Veronica, And and they're very capable shoulder pads, public defender, and so they were. They were very distinct roles, which otherwise was a very masculine Thursday Night. Yes, you know, heavy, heavy show. So we were very fortunate in the eighties. And I don't think that the pair from Hill Street Blues gets nearly the credit that they should.

And because Cagney and Lacy cleaned up in the best, you know, dramatic bleeding actress role in all of those years, it just yeah, nobody else got to get a shot. Yeah. Yeah. Betty Thomas did very well as a director, Yes she did. Yes, she went on become a director.

She did very well as an actress. Yeah. Did she direct the first Brady Bunch movie. I want to say, Bettie Thomas, I mean yes, and something more significant than that. But don't get her confused with Penny Marshall.

No, Penny Marshall. Oh my god, that'll be my own podcast. I gotta go dream about Benny Marshall. I mean, a director that literally did not get the respect you know, of making so many hit like creative and commercial hits, big and league of their own, should have given her carte blanche. She should be making movies and doing everything every year, yea, for the rest of her life, just for those movies alone.

And if her name had been Peter Marshall or Gary Marshall, Yeah, Marshall, very very nice. He did seem to lift up a lot of women as far as I hear. Okay, so well, Betty, Betty Thomas, Betty Thomas, if you're listening to this podcast, recognize that you have some really serious, knowledgeable fans who will bring you on to an episode of their podcast and just let you retell the best stories and celebrate the women you've worked with. If you listeners happen to be listening, and you know Betty Thomas for some reason, just to give her the show out, tell her to listen in. We will use your time and we will raise your voice the way that it should be, the way it always should have been.

You know, there are still many tomorrows and many opportunities for women who are in the Fields. We'd love to bring you forward. Absolutely a quick rundown of some of her movies twenty eight Days, Private Parts. I know she did the Howard Stern right, Howard Stern in ninety seven, Troope Beverly Hills nineteen ninety eight, that was with Um Shelley Long. Yes, thank you.

Yeah, you gotta do it much faster than my computer did, and these right, And she was also directing some Grayson Frankie, oh yeah. And of course Alvin and the Chipmunks one of the albums and the Chipmunks listen, don't it's yes, she got the money. Hey Alvin, no hate, would you? Hey Alvin? That's how I knew that so well.

When I was a child, I so identified with Alvin. I was in so much trouble all the time. So, you know, another thing about the evolution of podcasts is that I think we have definitely become legitimized as sort of this archive that is out there for free, that we are respectable. I mean, you can either try to entertain and be coy and not do your homework, or you know your stuff and you understand the mission of why you pick up the microphone and you prepare and produce and do this labor of love that we're doing. And so the Betty thomas Is of the world, all they have to do is listen to a couple of your episodes from your first season, or any of my episodes, and they realize, Wow, this is forty five minutes of my time.

Of course I'm going to do this. So yeah. I think one of the things that I love about your show and I'm discovering about our show is that in the world we don't celebrate women enough, and so when you do, it stands out. It becomes like a beautiful flower of a field of flowers to laud the accomplishments and the history of powerful female stories and examine how gender, which now is expanding, thankfully to include so much more than the binary, but how gender plays a giant role in our power, in our politics, in our culture, and how we see ourselves, and that we have to examine this in order to sort of imagine and create the world we want ahead of us. And the format of podcast many without commercials, with a few, but it's a way to have a long discussion about some of these questions and issues, much more so than you can do on your regular talk show or late night talk show on television these days.

And we've only been doing this a relatively short time, and it's just been fascinating and awesome that we take as much time as we need. We don't have to worry about is it, you know, making it this short or this long. We just talk until we until we get until we exhaust ourselves. Pretty much to world, we've all just had more than enough. Well, and to Susan's point, the notion that we are, we are pausing in our lives to celebrate and to just gush.

And sometimes I will just say that a performance was single hand. I mean I will gush shit length about China Beach, for instance, because I do believe it was this, that, and the other. We need to celebrate. We can do that because somebody else who all of a sudden it's like, oh I remember China Beach or Designing Women or whatever. It's been a long time since they thought about it.

And we're not getting into their ears that we can be negative. We're trying to really goose those endorphins, all of the positive things that come when you hear positive, when you hear compliments. That we can give a little bit of ourselves to be positive about a performance that happened forty years ago. Men do it quite adroitly, and they do it quite frequently, and we as women, I guess, somehow think that celebration and recognition is pie because we're not going to give up any more than we need to. And I'm convinced that it just is this positive feeling.

And so we're educating as well as we are trying to model why it's important to say, you guys are doing a great job. You've stepped into the podcasting world at this time to pick off this one footprint of TV her story because that's what you guys are. You're in the middle of it, and you have built your square and you are now going to work it, and you're going to build this tremendous catalog of interviews and series and clips and analysis. And I give you guys credit for taking time out of otherwise what is your life to dedicate this. We are not academics, and sadly, I think it's been very difficult to get academics to understand the role that podcasts play.

And it's very difficult sometimes to even access what academics are writing because academia loves to keep it self very secluded. Yeah, you gotta be in to get in to read some of that stuff. It's true. I think we're all right, So we're gonna take a little break. Hey, it's David here, and this is Rob.

We are the hosts of a brand new podcast called Totally Eighties and Nineties Recall. If you love all things eighties and nineties, from music and movies to television and pop culture, then this is the podcast for you. Join two gen X dudes every week as we revisit and discuss all of our favorite things from when we grew up in the eighties and nineties for a fun and nostalgic look back at two of the best decades. So come and listen for yourself. We promise you'll have a great time, and then go subscribe to Totally Eighties and Nineties Recall on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome back. So, anyway you've been doing this for a while, I would be curious about, like some of the interviews and guests and books that are your favorite episodes or in your favorite episodes any higher. Yeah, I will say that I do try to. I have a whole cadre of sort of women in academia who have granted me interviews. I've been very grateful.

When I was in Chicago, I was able to get to Michigan and Wisconsin and actually travel to their offices. And Robin means Coleman doctor. Robin means Coleman is a very smart woman, and she knows her just she knows her a different world that she's taught it for many years. And now she's back at that's a great episode of years. And she's at Northwestern and I was in her office and here in an acrylic frame is a handwritten note from Michelle Obama and I was like, Okay, I'm just going to stop here.

And I went into that interview having never you know, I kind of sent her a cold call kind of email, and I had read a couple of her academic articles. And by the time she left, she's like, oh, come, you know, we'll do this again, and I'm like yeah, And then she gave me a hug, and it's like, you know, because we sat for two hours and talked about a Different World and Debbie Allen and how important that series was then and even still today. It's just it's so powerful, and that's when we're going to cover this season. So I'm really glad we're having you on talking about that, how groundbreaking it was. And I know that episode.

I'm going to put it in our audiography and you can link to it on the website because it's a really spectacular episode of hers talking about a different world with her and Margaret show too that I was really thrilled to get her. And again she understands forty five minutes of her time, you know, kind of on her soapbox. I let her talk about specifically in her series American Girl, and yeah, so and I mean I remember that because it was so groundbreaking too. And I also remember how she did not have the support that you would want to exist. It definitely felt like she was alone out there trying to make that show, even though I know a lot of people were making that show with her, But in terms of being representative, that was.

Yeah, it had really good intentions. Yeah, and that unfortunately some of the whole issue had to do with her weight, and yeah, she was not treated well, but I would say that the interview overall, she was very positive and she has used that entire experience to become much more of an advocate on a number of different levels, both for people of color, for Asian women, for you know, body side, I mean everything. She's a force. Yeah, we're huge fans. One of the other episodes, you talked about how important it was to have DVDs or some hard format of the shows that you love so in case they go off streaming, which happens, or some aren't on streaming, and it just reminded me that I did.

I was so happy that I had the entire DVD set of Remington Steel and Scarecromisis King because I loved them before I started this podcast, so I was very happy to have them, and I thought it was such an interesting idea. Yeah, in the move, I relocated obviously all of my DVDs, and now I need to go through some thing that's very methodical so that I I can just sort of soak them all up. I do love it having it on DVD, even like I'm like Sex in the City, Do I really need this? Yeah, I'm not gonna let it go, not yet. No, Yeah, you gotta yeah.

Yeah. What I think not enough people understand is that they appreciate the convenience of streaming. Maybe they like TV, but they don't necessarily think of themselves as of loving TV. And you have to be of a certain age that by the time there was a video store that actually had TV series that you might have remembered but hadn't gotten to see because they were devailable in syndication, that it was accessible it all of a sudden you could get it. And a movie you could see Casablanca without having to think that it might come on at ten thirty at night and you're gonna have to stay awake.

That physical accessibility for some people is super important. And I still am convinced that as the corporations and the media conglomerates continue to merge and merge, they hold all this power. And if you really gonna just take streaming, what streaming offers you and will continue to offer you at a price. How badly do you want to see meet Me in Saint Louis on Christmas Eve? Do you want to pay seven ninety nine?

You want to pay eleven ninety nine just to see it? You don't get to own it. Maybe that's what it's worth you, but I'm going to see it in July. It's true you want to like, I well, and it's because I went to film school right in the eighties and it was really you wanted to track down these classics or even modern classics to use as formula for what you were working on. And I remember walking into a video store this would have been in the nineties, a Blockbuster for goodness sake, because I wanted to get a copy of die Hard because I was writing basically a Diehard on a blank for work.

And I'm like, oh, I'm gonna go watch die Hard and that's going to help me structure this action die Hard you know, meets RoboCop movie that I'm writing. And so I went in, I went to the Blockbuster. I'm like, looking around, I can't find it. They got die Hard too. I think maybe they had die Hard three by this point, I don't know.

But I then walk up to the counter to this you know dude, and I'm like, hey, die Hard and he's like, I'm like, is it checked out? And he's like, no, we don't have it. And I was like, it's die Hard. I mean, there was no bigger movie for filmmakers, and you know, in the world of action movies than die Hard. And the fact that like I don't know five years later, ten years or whatever it was.

I was flummixed. I was flummixed that I couldn't get Die Hard at the Blockbuster. And that's when I was like, I got to own a copy of VHS, and then I got the DVD and now we have the whole series on DVT because when you need it, yeah, when you need it, and you never know when you're gonna need it sometimes, yes. But the other sad thing too is I think most of us are under the impression that everything is available, and sadly it's not for a variety of reasons. You know, recently with the merger with Discovery, HBO, Max has been pulling stuff off of their streaming service for no particular reason, or at least not when they're willing to share.

So you now can't go watch some of those things if you were so inclined. A lot of series, especially in the eighties and before DVDs really became really popular, were never released in full anyway on DVD or VHS. Even Murphy Brown, I think they put out the first couple of seasons and then didn't end up releasing all eleven seasons, so that's not available. If you want to go and even buy the DVDs. I'm not even sure if it's available to stream anywhere.

My understanding is that the contracts that were written at the time of the creation of Urfey Brown did not include I don't even think it included syndication specifically, or it was very very tight syndication and then reproduction none of it. And some of that had to do with the music. That's very well documented that the music rights have hung up a lot of Murphy Brown and a lot of shows I mean that music rights. Yeah, if you don't get those music rights at the beginning in perpetuity for the universe and all that stuff, which are expensive, so sometimes you don't. Yeah, and there are a lot a number of things, but Murphy Brown probably being the biggest one, and oh the one with Fred Savage, The Kids Wonder Years, anything that was really really built around music like that show was.

But but again, we tend to think that, oh, everything is available, and then you go try to find it and you can't, and you know, and there's weird little one off, like you'll be watching a whole season and somehow you know there's an episode that's just dropped out of that season, like trying to think of something in particular recently, but it's weird. And then well, thirty Rock removed four episodes about blackface, even though it was recognizing the political implications of black face. Still they just did not want to even go there. So, yeah, because it couldn't get taken out of context. Yes, you asked the question that sort of gote us down this rabbit hole of favorite favorite episodes or whatever, and I indicated two interviews and advanced TV verstory is as much, you know, the conversation I have in my head with myself and my chasing information and doing research and finding the connection that hadn't really been thought of, or if it has been thought of, it's sitting in academia, in academia, and let us look at it.

So I'm just going to bring it to the masses. And that's where I really When when Linda Blood Ruth Thomason of Designing Women brought forward, she wrote in The Hollywood Reporter this whole column about how she left Hollywood on a rail courtesy of Les Moonbiz who was at that time he was under siege at CBS. He had finally left CBSS for good. Reason as president and all of that, Yes, and it all started to make sense. And then also thinking about the other episode that I did called Designing Women won Body Shamer's zero, and it's the episode entitled they shoot fat women, don't they?

And that was at the crux. I certainly remember reading the National Acquirer articles about Linda and Suzanne sugar Baker played by Delta Burke, who was gaining weight and they didn't understand why, and it was becoming this big point of criticism, and she was obviously struggling personally. She's talked a little bit about it, but not a lot. It's not our business. And Linda had to deal with it as a showrunner and she was often the writer and director, and we the viewers only got a little bit of that whole story.

We don't really understand. And of course what sells National Acquirers is to have a cat fight, to have women fighting each other. You couldn't possibly have women supporting each other. That doesn't sell a paper. Yeah, we talked about that, yeah, or just being good coworkers.

I mean that just you know, that's what right happens in the works. So we need to talk about that because sometimes sometimes it's very subtle and all of a sudden you're being turned against this woman. And Madeline Albright would say that, you know, we should always be supporting each other because that's the only way we're going to get ahead. There's a lot to learn about feminism from some of these stories that we are only now getting the full picture of. Yeah, the recognition that and these are the light bulbs that went off, you know, in my head with the me too and all that stuff of and being an early person Maggie movies.

And there was once someone like we were looking at casting and I was like, oh, how about this actress and immediately was told, oh, she's terrible, she's difficult. And now I'm like, was she or did she just not sleep with someone or wanted to call it out when she got hit on appropriately? And you know, like that like now I'm looking at these conversations that I had in my young career, not knowing all what might be behind them. This this world like the rest of the iceberg, right, the rest of the story is Paul Harvey would say, right, yes, yeah, And I think that's also interesting to me. I mean, we're we're having fun, We're looking at these these shows, sometimes with a very goofy point of view, and certainly a fan point of view in a lot of ways, but we're also really interested in these deeper underneath stuff of you know, what is it to be difficult on set if you're a woman versus if you're a man.

You know, why is that story so different? And it is? It is? You know, I mean, it's impossible to think that there haven't been men who are quote unquote difficult on set, and yet it never makes it out into the world or what. You know.

I'm not quite sure why. That is the only the only time recently that I remember hearing about this, and in fact, not that my memory is infallible, but the only time I remember hearing it at all was a couple of years ago on a Fox show with Damon Wayne's junior and his co star whose name I can't remember, and suddenly there was all this in the press about how they didn't get along and all of this, and I just remember thinking, I can't ever remember hearing this kind of story about two male costars. And yet on every show practically that is in the cast is dominated by women, there always seems to be some question about Are they friends? Do they get along? Yeah?

If I'm Charlie's Angels to call me and Lacy even you know, it's like it's a requirement that in the workplace, because they're women, that they're supposed to go out for drinks and hang out and braid each other's hair or whatever it is that people think that they're supposed to be doing together because they're women when they're not working. And yet you never hear I can almost never remember hearing that about Mail Coach stars on a show I think you told me recently about a team and some of the issues on that show. I never heard anything about that. Yeah. Yeah, brotherhood has tight lipped, absolutely absolutely, And it's it's one of the many crosses that women have to bear that men do not.

There's an expectation sometimes between women themselves about how women are supposed to be in the workplace that's not put upon men. And we certainly see that over and over again, and how television is covered. The most recent example I can think of on that is Sex in the City, and then the movies and now getting back to what's the called and just like that, yeh, Kim Catrell not not wanting to be in it for all of her reasons, and immediately it has to be this personal thing and this power thing. And I think they, as mature women, mature experienced women, I have done everything they can to simply say there's no story here, and still it won't let it. It has to be We're going to create this antagonism between women on purpose because we're emotional.

Yes, because we're so emotional. Another aspect of feminism that I think we in the podcast world can continue to explore because at the very minimum, I think who we understand our listeners to be are people who are always kind of looking for the different perspective. And I was thinking about this last night when I was thinking about a Different World and how it was a spinoff. It was derived from the Bill Cosby Show, and at the time that it did, Bill Cosby could do no wrong, and we have now since learned that Bill Cosby could do a lot wrong and he was not called on it for a very long time. There were many victims of the things that he did, and there's nothing that would make me disbelieve the women who survived his abuse.

But to put myself in the Debbie Allen or the Felicia Rashad shoes where we can be critical in twenty twenty two, we can be critic Didn't they know? Shouldn't they have said something? You know? Shouldn't they have distanced themselves? Did they really need his help?

They made very smart decisions. These are two very smart women, and they had an opportunity and he opened a door for them. And they were storytellers and a very high quality TV. And we have to keep thinking about that because we can't. We aren't necessarily going to You can't dismiss the art that Debbie Allen created from the second season of A Different World on It was head and shoulders better than Annie Bates in the first season.

I also think we have this imagined. You know from television and movies ideal that it is all you need is a little bit of gumption to speak truth to power. And that is not true. There is no good moment when you are beholden to great power to really speak truth. It takes I'm risking my entire career, possibly even more, possibly the safety of myself and for something.

And again, the rumor mill in Hollywood tells you a lot, but it doesn't tell you everything. You know I was working for Disney, and a friend of mine called and said, I really went and Disney just bought Aramax. I didn't work from Aramax. I just was working in Disney marketing for features. So but a friend of mine called and said, it's my dream to work from Airmax.

Can you make an introduction? So I call over to an assistant I know who was connected, and I'm like, okay, so my friend wants a job at Merrimax. And that person said no, they don't and told me that they did not want a job at Merrimax to be an assistant to somebody and start there, that it was not a good or fun place to be. I took that to be, Oh, these people are just sort of cruel. They're swimming with the sharks.

You know, this is a hostile, abusive environment. I didn't take that as something that was in addition to that sexual abuse and harassment and rape. But the known entity was the word back to me was this is not somewhere you want to go. If it's a friend of yours, you don't want to send your friend into this environment. And so I passed that on.

I didn't have any other information. I couldn't call anyone out on that information. That was somebody giving me a solid piece of information that was not very solid at all. It was just a comment and I passed it back to my person. That's how you find out about information.

But it's really more this person's difficult to work with, that person's difficult to work for. There aren't a lot of specifics, and I don't know. I mean, again, that's a very different position that I was in than someone you know working in these worlds. But the world's are very siloed, and power is very very siloed. Power protects itself, and it's really I think it is when we're seeing it is very hard to take down powerful men.

We only get to take them down who have abused the system so egregiously. They only get taken down when they're old and weak. Nobody called out Harvey Weinstein when he was at the top of his power. Nobody called out Bill Cosby when he was at the top of his power. They tried to Nobody listened.

And the people that knew that we're in a position maybe to do something about it, we're making too much money and didn't necessarily want to know or want to do anything about it. I say that because I also worked for Disney and someone that I became acquainted with that had worked in the high levels of NBC. There was something in the news or something we were talking about unrelated to this, about Bill Cosby, and I said, I said, And she just said to me, and I quote, Bill Cosby is a bad man, and that's all she said, What do you Bill Cosby is a bad man? Now? Like Susan and I didn't have any context for that.

I didn't quite know what that meant in what way she was meaning that, But it said to me that somebody at that network new or should have known what was happening, but there was too much money on the table. So, like a lot of things that we have not heard about to this day and we'll never hear about that have gone down, they chose to look the other way. It's not right, it's it's all kinds of wrong, but it is. It is. It is what happens a lot of times.

And like you said, it's not simple, right, There's nothing. There's nothing simple about stepping into areas where the power structures are imbalanced, and the imbalance of power structure leads to corruption and abuse. It just does. I've always found it unfair. This is just my opinion.

When things like this happened come to light and then fingers start getting pointed at coastars or other people who had no power really to do anything about it, even if they had known. Why is it up to it? There are other people that were more powerful than them that knew, probably knew, they did nothing. Why is nobody pointing at them? Why nobody putting the blame on them?

Because I just think I just think that's unfair. It's unfair, and it's it's not the problem, right, We're not even pointing to the problem, which is like that person should not have done that. That was illegal and they should have been held accountable and justice was not equal in that case, and you were unable to hold him accountable, and so there's one person to blame in that situation. There's other people that you recognize now. But it's the it's again talking about police abuse, talking about these things.

The institution is wrong. The format of the institution, and an institution that is based on a hierarchy that is based on abuse, whether it's slavery or women being servants and broodmare's, those are structures that need to be questioned, right, whether it's based on capitalism completely unchecked, those are structures that need to be questioned and calling what we really have gone? Yeah, we have gone really really dark and deadly. Oh my gosh, we're gonna have to stop here. We've run out of time.

We're gonna have to save the part two for our next episode. Sharon, Well, them's the breaks. I guess we keep doing this to them. We're sorry and we're also happy, but trust us, you definitely want to come back for part two. Well, then re examine all the power structures and we'll break them all down and we'll, you know, we'll talk them.

We'll talk more about TV when we come back. Yes for our audioography today, of course, the podcast I'm recommending is Advanced TV Hearstory. Find it at tvhirstory dot com, tv h R S t o r y dot com and a shout out to our friend Kenya Rothstein. Her podcast is called thank You for Saying and as about finding meaning in life unexpected turns. Her conversations are about finding ways to be thankful when we've been told no.

It will inspire you that when things don't go according to plan, it will still work out potentially even better than you could have ever imagined. So check out Kenya's podcast. Thank you for saying No, Thank you for listening to Eighties tv Ladies. We are so excited to have you back for season two. We love hearing from you.

Send us your thoughts questions at our website Eighties tv ladies dot com. That's eight zero stv ladies dot com. We read every email. Stay tuned for next episode where we finish our conversation with Cynthia Bemis Abrams. We hope Eighties TV Ladies brings you joy and laughter and lots of fabulous new and old shows to watch, all of which leads us forward toward being amazing ladies of the twenty first century.

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