A potential revival of the classic NBC comedy The Facts of Life was effectively sabotaged by a “greedy” co-star who quietly tried to set up her own spinoff, says Mindy Cohn.
During a recent hit on SiriusXM’s Jeff Lewis Live (watch video above), Cohn shared that in the wake of ABC’s December 2021 Live in Front of a Studio Audience special that re-enacted episodes of Facts as well as Diff’rent Strokes, executive producer and sitcom titan Norman Lear reached out to say, “I knew you guys were still popular, but holy hell. The response from the Live [special]!”
Cohn and surviving co-stars Kim Fields and Lisa Whelchel had cameos in the ABC special. TV house mom Charlotte Rae passed away in 2018, while Nancy McKeon had recently moved, so it was “difficult for her to make the trip out,” Whelchel explained.
Cohn says that Lear proceeded to ask her and her onetime castmates if they were interested in a revival. “We had never really talked about it, but we all started to consider it a little bit,” Cohn says. In fact, “We hired a writer, and the four of us got together on Zooms” to discuss.
The “drama” that came next, however, was “not cute,” Cohn says.
“One of the girls … went behind our backs and tried to make a separate deal for a spinoff just for herself and devastated the rest of us,” Cohn shares, not naming names (but agreeing with a co-host who labeled the backstabber a “greedy bitch”).
“For a 40-year friendship and sisterhood, there was tidal wave of emotion” resulting from the attempted end run, Cohn says. Unsurprisingly, as a result, said Facts of Life revival is “dead. It’s very dead,” given that the former co-stars have “no desire to ever work together.
“A couple of people can’t move past it, don’t want to move past it,” Cohn shares. “We were united for 40 years over not talking about each other, not doing dirty, ‘all for one, one for all,’ and this kind of wrecked that, which is sad. Really sad.”
Cohn did not specify if Fields, McKeon or Whelchel was to blame, but said that the Jeff Lewis Live hosts had a “33% chance” of guessing right — and perhaps might fare better if they skimmed her Instagram to with whom she has and hasn’t posted in recent years.
