“The Facts of Life” star Mindy Cohn says a revival of the hit ABC comedy was thwarted by a “greedy” co-star who quietly tried to create her own spin-off.
Cohn, 58, who played Natalie on the beloved sitcom from 1979 to 1988, made a cameo on the popular special “Live in Front of a Studio Audience” in 2021. She said executive producer Norman Lear, who died last December, told her and her co-stars at the time that he was blown away by the positive response to her appearance on the special and wondered if they would be interested in a reboot after that.
The actress and her surviving former castmates — Lisa Whelchel, Kim Fields and Nancy McKeon — “had never really talked about it, but we all started to consider it a little bit,” Cohn said Wednesday on Sirius XM’s “Jeff Lewis Live.” “We got into discussions and hired a writer, and the four of us got together on Zoom — this was during COVID — and we had meetings with Norman about it.”
But, without naming names, Cohn said there was “drama” and “it wasn’t pretty,” cryptically suggesting there was sabotage by “one of them” behind the scenes.
“One of the girls… went behind our backs and tried to make a side deal for a spin-off just for her and it devastated the rest of us,” he said.
“Even though it was a 40-year friendship and brotherhood, there was a wave of emotions around it,” he said, agreeing with a panelist during the Sirius XM interview that the alleged culprit “was a greedy bitch.”
Cohn said they wouldn't be speaking to their co-star “for a while”: “Right now, yes.”is… It was a woe [there’s no trust] and no desire to work together ever again.”
So, he confirmed, a “Facts of Life” reboot is “very much dead.”
Mindy Cohn, from left, Geri Jewell, Lisa Whelchel, Charlotte Rae and Nancy McKeon attend “The Facts Of Life” reunion at the 2014 Paley Fest in Beverly Hills.
(Richard Shotwell/Invision/Associated Press)
“There are a couple of people who can’t get over it, don’t want to get over it,” he said. “We were united for 40 years by not talking about each other, by not doing dirty things, by the principle of ‘all for one, one for all,’ and this destroyed all of that, which is sad. Really sad.”
“The Facts of Life,” which began in 1979 as a spin-off of “Diff'rent Strokes,” starred the late Charlotte Rae as housemother Edna Garrett (and later Cloris Leachman as Beverly Ann Stickle), who taught the girls at Eastland High School how to deal with their teenage problems.
The Emmy-nominated series centered on Cohn as class clown Natalie; Fields as her best friend and aspiring actress Tootie; Whelchel as spoiled, wealthy Blair Warner and McKeon as Blair’s counterpart, Jo Polniaczek, a Bronx street urchin. The cast (minus McKeon, the star of “The Division”) reunited in 2001 for a made-for-TV movie titled “The Facts of Life Reunion” that aired during ABC’s “The Wonderful World of Disney.”
Cohn, who went public with her battle with metastatic breast cancer in 2017, has reunited with her co-stars periodically over the years and made a cameo alongside Fields and Whelchel on ABC’s 2021 special “Live in Front of a Studio Audience.” But she wouldn’t directly “deny or confirm” which of them caused the reboot to crash. She did, however, tell Lewis and the panel that it wasn’t her and that they had a “33% chance” of guessing correctly. She also said they’d find out the answer if they scrolled through her Instagram account to see which co-star has lacked a prominent presence in recent years. (We checked: Fields and McKeon have both received regular birthday wishes.)
“Some people are so desperate for money or fame that it drives them to do things that surprise me, who am not yet jaded,” she said. “It always freaks me out a little bit when people do that, throw away friendships, deep, true friendships, for a dollar.”
A representative for Whelchel did not immediately respond to The Times' request for comment Wednesday.
