Hey, you crazy summer kids.

It's Sharon Johnson for Ady Stevie Ladies.

And Susan Lambert HadAM.

We launched this podcast three years ago, and for this summer, we want to take you back to the sweet summer days of July twentieth, twenty twenty two, to be exact, which is when we launched our first episode, starting our podcast.

Way back when we were young and slightly not so innocent, emerging from the COVID pandemic, thinking things might start getting back to a new normal.

Joe Biden was our calm, cool president, keeping a lid on the economy, passing infrastructure bills.

We were in the first summer of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Europe had this summer heat wave.

And on June twenty fourth, twenty twenty two, the US Supreme Court overturned Row and Casey in Dobbs decision, ending the national legal protections for the right to abortion.

We were protesting.

It was a crazy time and it's just gotten crazier, but we were also very excited to be starting our podcast.

It was truly a leap of faith that someone else would be interested in talking and listening about the Ladies of eighties television and you guys showed up.

We're so grateful to our early listeners and this one is really sweet to hear for the first time or to revisit.

You can tell we learned a lot about podcasting in the last three years.

Before we start off, I just want to thank our incredible team, Sharon Melissa, Kevin Doucy, our nineties TV babies, Serena Fontanessi, Megan Ruble, Sergio Perez, Sailor Franklin, and Anna Shekel.

And thank you to all of our guests for the last three years and our incredible Patreon supporters.

Y'all help make this show.

We hope to be providing you some more fun stuff on Patreon, so please keep checking it out.

And now we're going to give you our first podcast.

Please enjoy this throwback to twenty twenty two, our very first Eighties TV Ladies episode appropriately entitled The First Time with Scarecrow, Missus King, Eighties d.

Day, Crazy, Ancel, Pretty Bad, Through the City, and Gunning good Man World eighty dight.

Hello, everyone, Welcome to Eighties TV Ladies Episode one, the podcast that takes you on a journey to the fabulous television past.

I'm Susan Lambert Adam, an indie writer and producer who once competed in a rodeo cutting cows if you can believe it.

And I'm Sharon Johnson, Susan's co pilot.

I'm a television and podcast enthusiast with no rodeo experience.

On Eighties TV Ladies, we'll be examining beloved female driven TV shows of the nineteen eighties, with.

A few sidebars to this eventy's and nineties, and who knows what else we'll talk about, because we tend to get off track sometimes every now and then.

On this podcast, we're going to talk about everything from our childhood to Jacqueline Smith's fashion line, but mostly we'll be talking about television shows from nineteen eighty to nineteen eighty nine.

So today we will be looking at a type of show they made a lot in the eighties, don't make so much anymore, the action comedy.

It's also not one of the most incredibly super because I like to start off in the wads a little bit, so not a hugely super famous eighties show like Golden Girls or Remington Steel.

But I think people that didn't even see their shows know about their shows, but a beloved show with a very strong fan base and one that's very close to my heart.

Scarecrow Missus King, and.

You can count me amongst one of those people that didn't watch it but definitely knew of it.

It was created by Eugenie Ross Lemming and Brad Buckner.

Scarecrow and Missus King was an action comedy that premiered October third, nineteen eighty three.

The pilot episode was entitled the First Time.

It was written by Eugenie Ross Lemming and Brad Buckner and directed by Rod Holcombe.

It starred Kate Jackson and Bruce Boxleitner and ran four seasons on CBS from nineteen eighty three to nineteen eighty seven.

It also starred Beverly Garland, Mel Stewart and Martha Smith, and the guest cast in the pilot included John Saxon and Kate Reid.

I love John Saxon.

He's knew everything in the eighties.

He was the man.

Absolutely.

The pilot script for Scarecromasus King was entitled the First Time, which I thought was kind of cute because it was the first time they met, and it's the first pilot and So I do know that Kate Jackson was a huge star coming off of Charlie's Angels, one of the biggest shows in the so and she kind of had her pit of projects she you know.

So the rumor was that she was looking for a comedy because she wanted to do something very different from Charlie's Angels.

Then she read the script and really liked it and suddenly decided that is what she wanted to do.

Well, And it's a very different character than what she played in Charlie's Angels, what she was most known for.

She's now a suburban mom with two kids, divorced, just sort of living her life and then gets inadvertently dragged into this world of spies and spycraft.

I mean, it's a very very big shift from what she was known for.

For her to look at something like this, I can see why she would be interested.

Yeah, and I think what we've done is jump over something because again, we're still learning ourselves, so we didn't even explain to people what the show really is.

I just realized, but it's fine.

You guys are fine, because maybe you may already know that that you're here, so you're listening.

Probably that's the only people listening is the people who love Scarecrow.

Missus King anyway, a good idea just in case to just you know, just talk a little bit about what the show's about.

Yes.

So, Missus King as played by Kate Jackson, as I mentioned, as a suburban divorced mother of two who finds herself.

Working with a.

Spy in a pseudo CIA government.

Agency unnamed the agency, that's.

Right, that's right, and his code name is Scarecrow, hence the title of the show.

What happens in the pilot is she has dropped her boyfriend off at the train station.

He's at the train station running away from some people who are trying to get hold of the box that he has in the hedge, the package package, and in trying to evade them, he runs into her literally begs her to take this package and just hand it to somebody in a red hat on the train.

It's all he wants her to do.

And then he runs off and she sees him being accosted by these people who are who are chasing him, and then you know, things happened from there that get her pulled deeper and deeper into this this situation.

Well, you know it's going to be a comedy.

When she steps onto the plane, onto the plane, onto the train and looks down the train car and it is a sea of guys in red fezes yes, and so she doesn't know who to give the package to.

Of course that happens all the time, but it's a lovely moment and we get to see like basically k Jackson, you know, be very like again, it's very Katherine Hepburn in in in Baby, what's the tiger one or the panther one?

Not bringing up baby, bringing up baby, Okay, it's very it's very Catherine Hepburn and bringing up baby where she's scattered in.

The But at the same time she's clearly you know, yeah, she's a stereotypical divorced mom of two and living in the suburbs, but she's she starts showing how resourceful she can be through the course of this episode too, that she's not just you know, this sort of dim bulb sitting over in the corner that things let things happen to her.

She's able to kind of step up and and try to solve problems as which is which is nice to see.

So but it also the show also starred Beverlely Garland as as as Amanda King's mother who lives with her since the divorce, and Mel Stewart as her boss, Billy Melrose, and Martha Smith as the kind of dismissive other female agent, Francine Desmond.

One of the things that I like about the show was that there was another woman in the show, and that other woman, though they definitely had a little bit of like a snarky she had a snarky reaction to the housewife, they ultimately kind of become friends and co workers, and they easily could have not had that, and they easily could have taken that in a very like less interesting.

They didn't quite take it as interesting as you would now in the show.

I think they just didn't even know what they had kind of on the table of that.

One of the things I love about the show was that she was divorced and with two kids.

My mom at the time that the show started was divorced with two kids, and so that sort of resonated.

My mom also worked for Centers of Disease Control.

She was a microbologist, so she worked for the federal government.

It was not a secret like it is in the show.

So in the show, she keeps her secret government agency job from her family, and her family does not know that she is, you know, they think she's going out to do her dog walking job and various other jobs covers.

Yes, the cover for the agency is a film company that makes documentaries around the world, like about you know, crickets and uh.

And so that's the cover for why they have to Oh my god, we're going to be in the editing room late.

Oh my gosh, we have to go on location.

So that's the excuse for the spy stuff they have to go to.

So this chance meeting spends her life in a whole other direction, and she takes it like that.

I think that's the other thing is this really is a female driven show.

It is really about Amanda King's choices in this show and her discovering that she wants to be both a mom and make a difference.

There are several times in the pilot even where she says, I'm looking for a job.

Is there anything, So she definitely wasn't saying thanks very much, I'm gonna go on with my life and you guys do whatever you do.

She was like there was already like a seed was planted, and with this door being opened to this world she wasn't familiar with, but she obviously found intriguing enough to want to stay in it.

So all right.

And then I am, of course a big fan of romantic comedies, and Bruce Boxleitner and Kate Jackson I think are very cute together, and as these two, as as Scarecrow and Missus King.

Although a little bit like Lee, Stetson's very upset that he has to deal with this housewife who is sort of barging into the case more than he expected her to.

So of course it starts off with the but I don't even like you, now I have to work with you, so in and in one of the things that was fascinating to me and reading the original script, and again this is I found this online at a website that again I'm also going to shout out later, so I assume it's pretty legit.

It seems pretty legit.

There's several drafts of the of the first pilot online, which is really unusual for to be able to find for a show from the eighties.

And what's interesting, one of the biggest changes is that she was married to the the Deans.

So in the in the in the original pilot script, she was actually married and having this secret life again and I don't know what was happening to that, which I thought was kind of huge because it makes it not as exciting or fun.

It makes it a little bit creepy.

Yeah.

I'm not sure how they thought they could maintain that for the length of a series that you were hoping would run multiple seasons, because essentially you're asking her to lie to her husband constantly.

Yeah, and I think that was a really good change.

So a lot of times, a lot of times, you know, like the script will come in, they're like, oh, we love the script, but we're going to change this intand this, and sometimes those changes may not make the show better, but I think this one did because it made her a available.

They gave her this boyfriend at the start of the show, which is interesting because you never see him.

So they did this this gag in the pilot where only they're shooting over the shoulder of the boyfriend, or they're shooting you know, like you don't get to see him.

He's behind the couch.

Again.

It I you know, you sort of get why they're doing it, but it's something that works better sort of on the page than on the stage as because it feels awkward, Like it feels really awkward.

You're like, why are they not showing us this dude?

He can be and he's you know, he's a weather he's a weather guy, and he's a weatherman, and he's sort of not very exciting.

And she clearly knows that he's stable and a good guy, and you know, we'll stick around.

But it's clear that her mother's more interested in her pursuing that relationship then Amanda King is interested in pursuing that relationship.

So that's also like it.

But it was sort of also interesting to sort of like she clearly had this romantic relationship already in her life.

It may not have been the romantic relationship.

The other thing that I think is really interesting, we don't know this at the top of the show or even for the first season.

Really, there's no divorced husband around for the pilot.

He's just gone somewhere.

But another interesting thing over the course of show that I saw and noticed, she doesn't talk bad about him, right, it doesn't.

It's not it's just not in their day to day life and in the way that maybe you know, you could easily just assume he sees the kids on the weekends or holidays or whatever their their divorce called for.

But yeah, I mean, you wouldn't necessarily expect that he would be there every morning at breakfast and dinner since they're divorced, So it made perfect sense to me, I think in a lot of ways.

Yeah, but it's interesting because you you wouldn't do that now in a television show.

If you had, you would you would make more dramatic choices for these other characters in the show than they make.

And I think that was the very eighties.

The main characters got the drama, but the like it wasn't like, oh and then he's like they do later bring in and I'm spoiler alert, later in seasons they bring in the ex husband.

It becomes a little bit of drama, but not much.

What was interesting is like how little like that was just who she was at the start of the show.

She's divorced with two kids.

But it was also not like played for a lot of drama.

She needs a jump because she doesn't have enough money.

That that that sort of you know, and perhaps that was one of the choices that they made because to keep him kind of off the off the stage, if you will, because they didn't maybe maybe they felt they'd have to create create some sort of drama around the ex husband.

And this is a comedy, so it's probably just easier just to leave him out of the picture and just everybody just assumes he sees the kids at you know, other times other than when we're dipping into her life, and her mom is used as kind of the person that's kind of like, you're going, where are you're doing?

What are you going to be late for this?

You know kind of thing.

We're uh yeah.

The other thing is that that's funny is is her mom is used basically to assure the audience that her kids are okay when she's world kid like, like she's like, oh, you can pick up the kids, Like mom is there to hold down the floor literally so that she can go off and save the world.

But I have to give a shout out to Beverly Garland, who's amazing.

She's a great actress, like you know, classic like movies, TV star.

The joke being is that, like I just want to I want to point out that Remington Steel started a year before two years before I'm gonna have to go look better started just before Scarecrow Missus King.

And in Remington Steel, Beverly Garland plays the mom of Laura Halt I forget about that, which is very funny when she walks out and is again slightly different character, but basically the mom of our lead actress, detective slash Spy, and and we were like, literally, I was like, okay, this was her audition, Like they saw this and they were like, oh my god, you know who we need to get to be Amanda's mom.

Beverly Garland.

By the way, I never also never occurred to me that the Beverly Garland Hotel was related to the actress Beverly Garland.

Really, but it is.

Yeah, of course, yes it is.

I don't know why I didn't put it together.

I know in Hollywood, So in Los Angeles there's a Beverly Garland hotel and it's been there for decades.

Kates, Yeah, and I knew it existed, and literally, it never occurred to me that it was named after the actress and built for her by her husband, who clearly loved her very much and built her a hotel.

So yeah, So Beverly Garland plays the mom of all spies and detectives in television.

And Eugenie ross Lemming actually started as an actress and a comedian.

She started with Second City, which I also didn't know until I started researching this, which was very exciting because again Scarecrow miss King has a lot of comedy in it, and so she started as a comedy writer and a comedy actress.

And in fact, she was with the Second City team a lot with Harold Remis and John Belushi, which is which is again for me, those are like, oh my god, she worked with masters and ran with the wolves, like you know, so that I'm very excited.

Well, it's another example of how there's not one path for anything in this business.

In particular that those they started in the same place, but certainly didn't end up in the same place.

She ended up as a showrunner on television, John Belushi ended up as a comedic god to most of us.

And so you just never know where something that they're going to lead you, or your talents are going to lead you sometimes.

And you know what, I just watched an interview with her from the nineties and she literally talked about that She's like you just I just wanted to keep making stuff, and that became a way to, you know, to find a voice, which I thought was really interesting.

So and she's been partner.

They've been writing partners, Brad Buckner and her kind of since she started writing.

So the first show that they were on is Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman back in nineteen seventy seven.

Well, uh, and then but it was nineteen eighty three that they wrote a pilot called Scarecrow and Missus King, as far as I can tell, and I actually have a copy of that pilot, I script in hand.

I'm going to wave my scripture, all right, So I think we should take a little break and we'll come back and then talk more about Kate Jackson, talk more about the pilot the first time, and then about are really So we're going to do three questions, and then we're also going to do but is it?

We do a little segment.

We're going to call it but isn't.

So we'll be taking a break.

Stay with us, we'll be back.

We'll see you soon.

Welcome back to eighties TV ladies.

And we're talking about Scarecrow and Missus King.

And one thing we haven't really gone into is that it's romantic and sexy or I thought so.

Well, definitely, But I have always been of the opinion that men and women that work together on television don't need to have a romance.

That always seems to be kind of the direction that the writers like to push things because the audience, I think kind of likes it.

But for me, it's a double edged sword in that respect.

Well, for sure, And again but I think it was completely expected in the eighties that if you had a man or woman working together that they would be romantically involved, that there would be at least sexual tension between them.

I mean, Remington Steele had launched just before Scarecromis is King, and that was basically all that show is about.

In a lot of ways that in the cases, but I think this was very classic.

It was set up to be a romance as well, and what I enjoyed was that it was also them becoming friends as well as romantic partners.

Yeah, it was one thing I was glad about is they took as long as they did to go there, if you will, that it wasn't just from the beginning, even it seemed like it was headed that way, but you weren't entirely sure, which I kind of appreciate it because it gave the Amanda character a chance to learn her way in this new world and figure out what her worth and what she could contribute, and which I really appreciated.

Yeah, there was it was they actually really I think the pilot did a good job actually of setting up like their personalities in such a way that you knew like there was potential both for their friendship, their partnership and a romantic relationship, and I think it really balanced that out.

I really There's a scene at the Lincoln Memorial and it's very cute.

She's like, what are you doing for Thanksgiving?

Do you have place to go?

Are you okay?

Are you like?

You seem so alone?

He's like, I'm a loner, leave me alone.

But it's very it's very sweet.

There's a real sweetness to the Amanda King character that that everybody sort of bristles about in the agency world but ultimately ends up being kind of her superpower is that she sort of the naivete that she brings to it is the ability to enables her to see things that the rest of them can't see because they're so jaded and spy agency guys.

Yeah.

Absolutely, And you know, she brought a lot to the table, and I think things that she didn't really understand or know that she had to offer as well, and that was part of it.

And I like that they gave her a chance to speak up and you know, speaker thoughts and really contribute to to solving a number of the cases that they came up with, which's great.

Yeah, So we'll get into when we start looking at season one, which will be next next time, our next time as opposed to the first time that I did there with the pilot.

But we'll talk about some of my favorite episodes in season one and which one I think is sort of the penultimate episode of the show for me.

Maybe Sharon's going to have to pick one, and my imagination is going to be different from mine.

But I really liked when they you know, sort of kind of like worked really well together but were also themselves, like very strongly, Like the Amanda King character was like, well, this is how I do things, and the least debts in character was like, well I don't do things that way, but this is how I do things.

And when both of their strengths came together that was when the show sort of shined the most.

And for me also what became more later in the seasons, I think they really perfected it probably in later season one season two was sort of these little buttons at the end of the episode that were really mostly about them and those That's what I lived for, is those little character buttons where they were cute, either buddies or sexual at tension.

So that is my favorite.

And I'm a big fan of both these stars.

So like Kate Jackson, totally big fan of hers, Bruce box Seidler totally big fan of his, and I think again they both would have found a show where they could shine together in a way that was pretty unique for the time.

Oh absolutely, it's I know that there was Remington Steele, but that was a different kind of relationship, if you will.

But I.

Even though there was in this show, there was some and even in this pilot there was some indication of or dismissiveness of her suburban housewife ness.

It was never.

As dismissive as perhaps you might think it could have been at the time.

There was underneath it maybe just kind of okay, you're you're.

It was more of a you're inexperience, not you're stupid, you know what do you know?

And I think that was that was one of the strengths at the show.

Yeah, for sure, although in some of those early first season you're like, Okay, he's a little angry at her.

That's not nice.

But I think that was because like the amandic ing character was so nice and and and again I think even looking back, that still resonates for me.

And and one of the things that I felt like, Oh, here's this person who is actually not your typical spy or female detective character.

You know, Laura Holton Remington Steel is very tough.

Her whole point is I can do it.

I'm I always wanted to do this.

This is what I wanted to do, and I can do it as good as a man.

In fact, I do it as a man in some ways a man I invented and nobody knows that he's invented.

And then this guy walks in, right.

So the whole premise of that show is she is tough, and she is a detective, and she is up for that job.

And this is a woman who kind of felt like, oh, I'm a mom and I'm a housewife and I'm going to live this life.

And then her life got turned upside down and she sort of discovers what she wants to do and discovers that she can be both right and that is actually still even unusual that you can have both in this world.

Like it actually to me.

I look at something like Parks and Rec and in some ways there's a parallel for me looking at a showl like Parks and Rec where Leslie Nope is perky and sweet and driven, but ultimately a like is very much her own woman and a somewhat untraditional woman in a business environment, and yet is able to sort of bring all that home for herself and be incredibly successful and also true to kind of her sweetness.

And those characters really appealed to me.

Yeah, I liked that they didn't force her to lose that sense of herself.

Where As you said she's a nice person, she was still a nice person at the end, despite all the things she'd experienced and the things that she'd seen, the things that had happened, she still approached things from the standpoint of I'm going to treat people well, you.

Know, yeah, and I'm going to assume the best of them, even those Russian spies, a lot of Russian spies in this show because it was nineteen eighty three.

So yeah, and the show, you know, we'll get into it later.

The show takes a little Reagany, you know, kind of it's it's got a it's got some Reagan in the background because he was our president the time.

So but I want to also talk about Bruce box Lightner because I was a fan.

One of the reasons I watched this show was for him.

Bruce box Lightner, the star of Tron also the star for me.

Again.

The other place that I knew brought Bruce boxlighter from was Kenny Rogers The Gambler the TV movies.

But he also starred in How the West Was One, which was a television show.

And and right before this, he had done a show called Bring Him Back Alive that was sort of clearly inspired by sort of the Indiana Jones phenomenon and uh and and there was another show that same season that was another like you know, write the book, so you know, it was again sort of the sort of great White Hunter Explorer, Indiana Jonesy kind of a show.

But that was not a successful show.

So I think I was really glad when he showed up in Scarecrow Missus King.

I don't think I was really familiar with him before Scarecrow and This is King, which, as I think I mentioned earlier, earlier I did not watch but was aware of, because again, there are only three networks at the time, it was almost impossible not to at least be somewhat aware of some of the other shows.

So I didn't bring that into the show.

Of course, like everybody else who watched television, I was aware of Kate Jackson.

So well in Kate Jackson.

We'll do a deep dive on Kate Jackson later, but again, not only was she coming off Charlie's Angel but some of the stuff that I didn't quite realize even though I, again I was somewhat aware of her earlier shows, but she had starred in Dark Shadows and then The Rookie, and with The Rookie she became super famous, like she had the most fan male for that show than any of the other people on the show.

Really, yes, well by the end of that show.

So basically, when it came time to do Charlie's Angels, which was a really originally called The Alley Kats it was developed for Kate Jackson to start in.

She apparently renamed the show.

She said, Allie Katz is dumb.

I'll like she said that, but she was like, no, it should be called Harry's Angels, and then from there they ended up with Charlie's Angels.

But she also sort of made the show like wanted different things from that show show, which is from what I hear since made it a better show.

Now we can talk about whether it was a good show or not later.

But and she got to pick the character she played.

She was originally supposed to play Kelly, and a fairly later in development she decided she wanted to play Sabrina, and then Jacqueline Smith came in play Kelly.

But here's the thing.

So I was a little fascinated by Scarecrow Missus King because it was the first show that I saw female names at as executive pre show showrunner, and that made an impact of somebody that was interested in film and TV.

I was like, I took notice.

I remember sort of going, oh, and I am hard pressed to find some other female showrunners in the eighties, So I did a little research.

I guess it's not surprising that.

Finding any many be difficult because it still was, and certainly not as much now, but very much a like most businesses, very male dominated.

So yes, and I was surprised again that even you know, by the eighties, it was such an unusual thing to see a female showrunner.

What I will say, so I did little research.

The very first what they're calling the very first female showrunner, was Gertrude Berg, who was an actress and writer and producer and created a radio show called Rise of the Goldbergs, which later became known just as the Goldbergs.

And it was a sort of domestic comedy family show about a Jewish family in the Bronx.

And she starred in the show as the matriarch of that show, and that was incredibly popular.

She won a Tony and an Emmy Award for Best Actress.

And again it was first a radio show from nineteen twenty nine to nineteen forty six, and then it was a television show from nineteen forty nine to nineteen fifty six.

Now there were also shows that like a Betty White ran like kind of conversary talk shows, but that variety show, but it wasn't until twenty years later that apparently the next female showrunner appeared.

Charlotte Sue Brown was an American writer, producer, and director, and so I'm going to call her the first female showrunner who didn't star in the show of primetime network television.

And she ran Rota, the spinoff for the Mary Tyler Moore Show.

She was a protege of the creator of Mary Tyler Moore, James Brooks.

Thank you, I didn't get there, and had her first writing job on the Marriagetellymore Show, and then she worked for shows like Door Stay and Partry's Family, and then she came back on as a writer on Rhoda when they spun off, and then stayed on the show and worked her way up from writer, producer to executive producer.

That's great.

So that was my little research dive into the first female show runners.

But that was them again pretty late in the television game.

Twenty years.

Waiting twenty years for your next female, first female showrunner, Yeah, no question, but on some.

Level not surprising, I suppose, because it's it's kind of astonishing what Gertrude Berg was able to do back at that time, and it you know, the feminist movement really didn't start taking off until the late sixties early seventies, So it takes a while sometimes for things to trickle down up through to get to a point where things start to change and start to happen.

So I I wish I could say I were more surprised, but I don't.

So I think about it.

I don't think I am.

Yeah, you know, I don't think I am.

So yeah, it's it's a long time between trains sometimes.

Yeah, absolutely, all right.

So that question maybe brings us to one of the questions We're going to ask you on the show.

But is it And we're gonna look at Scarecromisus King, and we're going to ask this question.

When we're done looking at Scarecrow, Missus King, we want to say, but is it a feminist show?

It's female driven, but is it a feminist show?

I think it is, especially because Amanda King, as I said before, she's she's a suburban mom, she's got kids, and decides to start down this professional road that never sort of fell into her lap, that she never really thought about as something that might be a career for herself, and jumped into it with both feet and worked really hard at it and was very successful at it, and from that standpoint, I think absolutely it is.

She was a door open for her and she ran through it, So good for her.

All right, And I'm going to agree with you.

I think it is a feminist show, and I think it's one of the reasons I come back to it, and one of the reasons it has a pretty core fan base that even though it's again not the shows that you know, it may not be in that top one percent of shows, it's a show that I think weirdly holds up in a weird way, but it holds up as a feminist show because it basically stays about her and even though it's about them and and they're romance, it's really about does she get what she wants out of her world?

And I think ultimately, both in the pilot and in the show, in the course of the show, she does, and we're following like her story, even though we're also obviously following their story.

It is Scarecrow and Missus Gang and and you know, again the time also of the name shows Hardcastle, McCormick, you.

Know, Simon and Simon, Simon and Simon and on and on.

So yeah, yeah, ten Speed and Brown Shoe we can do a whole podcast on the name shows.

So yes, I am going to say this's a feminist show.

It's a little like it's got a lot of bumps.

There's a there's a you know, some missed opportunities for for doing more with Francine Desmond, the other Spy, and and Amanda King.

I think that those are two characters that you would now definitely do more with, even if the show is scarecrow Missus King.

And I think also again he you know, everybody else sort of learns a little lesson from Missus.

King absolutely and then begin to trust her and to listen to her and not you know, think, oh, she doesn't have anything to offer because she's this suburban housewife.

Yeah, and so there's there's a lot of that.

Now is it progressive and do we need to define progressive?

I think we needed to find progressive.

I well, I guess I would.

I would say it's progressive because it pushes the genre, if you will forward.

We are seeing a woman in a role the day we haven't seen before.

It's being successful, that's being respected.

So that says that despite what you might think of women who are primarily at home, that they do have something to offer, So there's a in that respect, I think it is progressive.

Sure, yeah, and I'm going to say it's sort of yes and no, which again I think we're gonna end up with a lot of that in the eighties.

But yes, I agree with you on all of that, because if you think about where things were in nineteen eighty three, what women were doing, I mean, just a few years before women were finally able to get credit cards in their own names without having to have some man in their life signed for it.

And here we have this woman who basically is saying, yeah, I did the normal thing.

I got married and then unfortunately I got divorced.

But now this is happening for me, and I want to do this.

I'm going to do this.

I have things to offer here.

Yeah, and I actually love the Again, it's sort of the challenge of the domestic home life versus saving the world.

Right, there's a lot of stuff that they do with that where it's like I'm still trying to hit I've got to fix my flat tire, you know, and get the kids to their dentists.

And so this will be very convenient that the office is near their dentist.

Like there's literally a line in the pilot when she realizes where the office is that it's close to our kids dentist.

And again, I think given that that's what you do as a as a parent, much less a single parent, you're trying to balance those worlds and there is a glimpse into that that we hadn't seen.

We'd seen it in like one day at a time.

We've seen it in other things, but but this was I'm going to have a challenge.

I'm going to choose a challenging career that I want to be a career and my home and my kids.

And in particular, I think that was very exciting to see and to see be fun and adventurous and not just burden some right, So in that way, I think it was progressive, still not incredibly progressive on on you know, elements of race, other you know, women roles.

So I think a lot of that was pushed by you know, I'm going to give Kate Jackson credit and the showrunners for pushing that for that lead role.

And again there's a couple of things.

There's another thing that's in the pilot script that did not make the aired pilot.

That's a line.

It's one line, but it was one of those things that said to me, that spoke to me is like, oh, these shows are showwriters were at least thinking a little bit progressively.

These creators show in the pilot script that Lincoln memorial scene and she's asking him about She's like, you know, any any missus spy, any little spies?

You know, any girlfriends, any boyfriends.

It's something that Missus King asks the spy guy if he has a boyfriend.

In the pilot script, which for nineteen eighty three I'm going to call pretty progressive.

Oh yeah, like I'm meeting you and I'm you know, it's not quite asking pronouns, but it's asking are you gay?

What's your personal life like?

And it's sort of like completely thrown in there that line in the pilot.

I don't know if they shot it a certain way and then changed it, but it is now anybodies, any girlfriends, any buddies.

So clearly someone between the pilot script, the first by the script which got changed a lot, and the aired pilot, that little tiny bit of progressive, like a like the barest hint of progressiveness kind of got pulled out.

And I think there's a lot of that in the script, and certainly in terms of you know, just there's another episode that's later that I just noticed because it had a black female spy working with Lee Stetson for like a line.

She had a lines, and she was in the scene with him and did a thing.

Oh no, she didn't have a line.

She looked like she was gonna have a line, and then she didn't.

And then they were doing the wrap up of this thing, and she's gone like, You're like, wait, but you had her there for You certainly had her there for at least an hour.

You probably paid her for the day.

Couldn't she be in the next scene and have a line?

Like so that background stuff.

I have to say, it feels like early on they were actually trying to do that.

There's a little bit of color in the show.

The pilot was shot in Washington, d C.

Which I think gives it a nice flavor that you don't usually see in the eighties, Like you really are like, oh, they're standing in DC.

But yeah, so I'm going to say it's it's sort of a five or six on the progressive.

I think for its time, it was very progressive.

But you're right as a you know, for ours.

It's hard not to look at it.

But and again I'm thinking of like I think one day, it's not covering issues of importance of the day.

So even though again that's not what the show is trying to do or even pretending to do, but it's it is progressive in this one way, but it's not in other ways.

So I'm going to say, fair enough, yea, fair enough?

All right?

So what's our next thing?

What acts are we going to talk about?

Is it time for three questions?

Three questions?

Okay, yes, let's do three questions?

All right.

Who's going first?

I'll go first.

So the first question is well, no, first means you have to ask me quests, all right, all right.

So the first question is no, or it means I have to ask you questions.

I think that's the first Either one is fine, all right, I'm going to ask you the question.

Okay, all right?

So what is the eighties ladies driven TV show that resonated with you.

I'm going to go with Designing Women.

It's a show that holds up surprisingly well these days.

It has moments that I will remember forever.

Most of them are Julia Sugar Baker rants because they're fabulous, and I liked that it was these four women working in a business together making it work, and they were all so different, they all had different things to bring to the table.

But yeah, it's a great show.

It is a great show.

And I remember I remember that aspect of they were friends, but they were also working together.

It was a little bit of life goals in that and I love that show as well.

I don't remember it as as much, but that is.

That is an awesome eighties TV Lady show.

So then, what is your current or current shows that are you would consider TV Lady show?

I have two.

On Network television.

Yes, I still watch network television.

Somebody's got I know, and that's me.

I'm the one Gray's Anatomy.

I've watched it from day one, loved it from day one, have stuck with it through thick and thin.

There have been some years it were I mean, it's eighteen, it's the season eighteen.

It's not all going to be great exactly.

Oh my god.

I don't know that we'll ever see a season eighteen for anything again.

So but I love it and the other one you can find on Paramount Plus.

It's called The Good Fight.

It's a.

Spin off, if you will, from a show that was on CBS called The Good Wife.

It stars the incomparable Christine Baranski, who has been overlooked, deprived of an Emmy for her work on that show for all these years.

She's amazing, She is amazing.

Yeah, it's an incredible show.

It's it's a wonderful, incredible show that goes in places, does things.

It's it's the showrunners are a married couple, Robert and why can't I think of her name?

The Kings is what I usually think of the mask and they are there.

It's an incredible show and I highly recommend it.

All right, The Good Wife just on my list.

I loved, I mean, I love The Good Wife.

And then The Good Fight is on my list.

It's literally in my queue.

And I watched the first episode and loved it.

And then of course I haven't gotten around to it because you cannot watch everything, yes exactly, but that is it's still in my queue.

I haven't taken it out of my queue.

So all right, all right, and then the last of the three questions, what's the most television moment that you've had in your life?

So at work, I am an Alto in the employee choir, and as part of the performance that we do, there is a some Christmas songs that are that are played that we don't necessarily have to sing, but their their voices singing it.

So we recorded them about five years ago, and movie nerd as well as television nerd that I am.

I was incredibly amazed to find that we would be recording re recording these songs at the Newman Stage at the Fox Studio over in Culver City.

The Newman Stage is named after the first of the many Newman men who scored all have scored all kinds of movies that you have all heard of, none of which I am coming to mind right at this moment.

But it felt I'd ever been on a stage like that before, but I could It was as if I could feel all of the other the ghost of all of the other movies that had been scored there and all the musicians that had played there, and it was magical.

I was going to say that that is that was pretty great.

Love.

I love those moments where you realize you're in someplace special, doing someplay special, and you'll sort of never match it, and you can kind of feel the beauty of being present in that.

Okay, So those are my three questions, now for yours.

So let's start again with what is the or are the eighties ladies driven TV shows that resonated with you?

Well, there's an awful lot of eighties television that resonated with me.

But I'm gonna I'm gonna pick my top three, Okay, which is Scarecrow and Missus King, one of the reasons we started this, which I still have a lot to say about.

So we'll do a few more episodes.

Remington Steele, which again one could argue started as a female driven television show and became a male driven television show, but I would really it's probably a both.

And then Cagney and Lacey and not because I watched a lot of Cagney and Lacey to be fair, as a kid.

It felt very serious.

It got very serious.

But the idea of Cagney Lacy existing was very resonant to me.

And I love those actresses and I loved watching them.

I didn't religiously watch that show, but that show was like, it was like, oh my god, we have our own starskin Hunch like like it was it was I knew it was important, but I also just liked kind of it.

And and it's again a show that visually has stayed with me that I think was really truly trying to be groundbreaking, and those actresses are are like amazing terrifict And what about currently?

What is resonating with you?

Now?

I'll see I should have done some research.

Oh what's the fun of that?

That is no fun at all?

Okay, So I'm just gonna go with things that just are popping off the top of my head.

Like I have to say, again, Parks and rec even though it's not now now still stays with me.

The good place still stays with me.

And I would watch it in an instant.

But in terms of just what's on now, you just start blanking on things.

They just slide away.

It's about the writer.

It's based on her book Shrill.

Thank you, I got there.

I got there.

It's just like an association game.

Shrill was really like I just finally caught up with it.

And that's the thing.

Now is is now whenever you happen to get it into your queue exactly right.

So I just caught up with Shrill and really enjoyed it and thought that again, as a show that feels both progressive and feminist, which is what I would call a lady's of TV show, a TV ladies.

I think that you know, that's right there, and there's just there's a lot now that's so exciting that there's like more than I can think of to name right now, which is fun.

But those are the ones that are in my mind right now.

Yes, it is an embarrassment of riches right now when it comes to watching television, and it's been for years, for several years, but continues to be impossible to watch it all.

Yes, we now have a big, big buffet exactly.

Okay.

And last, but not least, your own TV real life TV moment.

Okay.

So, probably one of the more dramatic moments of my life was a random thing that happened when I was driving back from Angel's Crest Forest with my boyfriend at the time, and we stopped to help this It was getting dark.

We were kind of having a little bit of a fight, but not really, but we were going to go see dark Man.

This is nineteen ninety.

We're driving back down into Glendale and I see this woman on the side of the road.

She's got a child in her arms and she looks like she's broken down.

There's a van and it looks like she's broken down.

So I pull over.

He's like, what are you doing?

And I'm like, she needs help.

And then she comes runs up to our car, gets in the car and says, I just needed to ride to the bottom of the hill.

And as I pull out, I realized there's somebody chasing us from that vehicle, and ultimately it turned out to be her husband, who was mad and drunk and had a gun oh and ended up following us down the mountain and fired twice at my car.

Wow, And it became this huge, very huge draw moment in which you realize it's absolutely zero fun to be in a dramatic moment like that and is really not where you want to be, and you want it to just end.

And then we were all safe when all of a sudden done, and he was arrested when all of a sudden done.

And then I ended up having to go to court and testify at the grand jury.

And it was a long, crazy thing that didn't necessarily end up great for me in terms of like how I felt about the whole experience.

But I do remember when we did finally end up going to see Dark Man that night that I was like, it is zero fun to watch them just gun play around this movie like it's no big deal.

But that was literally driving down a dark mountain road with a angry person behind you who is drunk according to their partner that's in your car with their child and having them and hearing shots.

Is was one of the most dramatic moments of my life.

So it was super dramatic.

I don't recommend it, and we all ended up safe in that moment afterwards, so we're lucky.

I just have no words.

That's incredible.

It was a weird moment.

It was really it made the paper.

Wow.

Uh My boyfriend's mother called him because his name is in the paper and was like, what happened, Uh, yeah, I made the Glendale News.

Wow.

Wow.

Well I'm glad that everybody you know got out of there.

In one thing, I'm super glad there.

It's it's insane.

I have never really owned any guns, and yet I've been shot at twice.

That's once, but that's a story for another die.

I like my drama scripted and filmed.

That's what I decided.

That sounds like a bumper sticker.

All right, I want to do the little part that I'm going to call audiology, which is a little bibliography for our podcast and for what we're looking at.

So first I want to tell you where to watch Scarecrow Missus King in case you want to check it out.

Well, probably the easiest place to watch it, because they own everything, is Amazon Prime.

That is probably the easiest place to watch it.

You will have to purchase it.

It is not part of their free video, so that's kind of a bummer.

However, I highly recommend the DVDs which are still available, which you can also find at Amazon or your DVD provider, because the quality of the sound and picture is much much better.

The Amazon streaming for eighty shows seems like a lot of people weren't paying attention to what they were doing.

I mean literally, the cropping is wrong.

They're cutting off the heads of Bruce box Lightner, and I think that is rude.

He's a tall guy, but you shouldn't cut off his head.

I've got a lot of the research that I did on fan sites for Scarecrimisus King, of which which is the best of which is called call Me a Cab and it's at call Me a Cab dot com, which is a line that's used in one of the later episodes, one of my favorite little exchanges between them.

And she has done an amazing job of collecting materials and she is also part of a podcast called the Missus King Chronicles along with three other ladies who are doing episode walkthroughs.

It's very fan base.

They're super adorable and it's really funny to hear them talk about the show.

So that's at mksepodcast dot com.

There are two books I actually looked at for this show.

One is called How Tall Are You?

By Greg Morton who starred in Scarecrow Missus King as the little brother.

But it's very he's talking.

He talks about being on the show and being a child actor in the eighties.

And then the other show is like an academic book and it is a television's feed Spies and crime Fighters, six hundred characters and shows nineteen fifties to the present, written by Karen A.

Romenko.

So are those are our audiology for this week.

There's some homework to do.

And now we want to give a shout out to our audio engineer, Kevin Deacy, co producer Melissa Roth, plus our social media manager and production assistant, Megan McKiernan, and a.

Special thanks to my husband, Richard Haddam, who will be on as a guest later in later episodes.

He's a podcast super guest.

It's been on many, many episodes of various podcasts, and so he had a lot of great advice for us.

I want to shout out the guys from Astonishing Legends Forrest Burgers and Scott Philbrick, a fabulous podcast about Astonishing Legends of supernatural phenomenon.

And our other advisors, Chris Stashue and Mike White from the Projection Booth and Culture Cast.

Check out their podcast if you haven't already.

Find out more about us at our website eightiestv Ladies dot com.

That's eight zero ads tv ladies dot com.

Let us know if you're liking this podcast.

Giving us a shout out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram really helps a lot, and through the website you can send us an email to tell us we got something wrong, but.

Not too wrong.

Don't meet, don't yell at us.

Well, Lissa thinks you're gonna yell at us, so please don't do that.

I want to be right.

Tell us what we got right.

We hope you join us for our next episode, We're going to continue our dive into Scarecromises King part two.

I know you think that there's that we've covered all the Scare Promises King, but we haven't, not at all.

We're going to look at the first season, which is adorable and funny and really fun.

We're going to talk about what went right and what we think went wrong in season one.

We're also going to look at the making of the show.

We get to talk about something that's not unheard of in television production, but it's still unusual.

In the middle of season one, Scarecromas is King change showrunners and so we're gonna We're gonna talk about that.

But I want to tell you a story or two about one day to Bartlett, the female showrunner that was brought on mid season and we'd go on to run the rest of season one and all of season two.

She's an incredibly underrated and lesser known showrunner who started on The Rockford Files.

We hope Eighties TV Ladies brings your joy and laughter and lots of fabulous new and old TV shows to watch, all of which will lead us toward being amazing ladies of the twenty first century.

I want to be an amazing lady of the twenty first century, sharing me too, Let's do it.

Okay, all right, thank you guys, see us soon.

Eighties day, so pretty

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