The Full Story of Charles in Charge

Two of the most successful comedy writers in American television got early freelance assignments on the same Scott Baio sitcom, and both of them watched almost every word they wrote get thrown away. One of them counted what survived: a single line about milk. The show itself was dropped by CBS after one season, sat dead for a year and a half, then came back in syndication with an entirely new family living in the same house, and ran four more years that way.

Charles in Charge was created by Michael Jacobs and Barbara Weisberg and executive produced by Al Burton, made by Al Burton Productions and Scholastic Productions with Universal Television. It premiered on CBS on October 3, 1984, was gone by April 1985, and returned in first-run syndication on January 3, 1987 with only Scott Baio and Willie Aames carried over. It ran to November 10, 1990, five seasons and 126 episodes in total.

A CBS sitcom that did not work

The setup was simple enough to survive anything: a college student takes a live-in job minding somebody else's kids in exchange for room and board. Charles has no surname, attends Copeland College in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and looks after the three Pembroke children while his best friend Buddy Lembeck wanders in and out.

CBS put it on Wednesday at 8:00 pm, which in the fall of 1984 meant running directly at ABC's The Fall Guy and NBC's new Michael Landon vehicle Highway to Heaven. It did not win that hour. The network let it finish the 22 episodes it had ordered, then put it on hiatus after the February 27, 1985 episode, holding the last two back and burning them off on March 13 and April 3.

That is the ordinary death of an ordinary sitcom, and by the usual rules of 1985 it should have been the end.

The trend that brought it back

It was not the end, because the economics of television had opened a side door. Cancelled network shows were being revived for first-run syndication, sold station by station rather than to a network, and enough of them were working that the practice became a genuine trend. Universal reworked Charles in Charge and relaunched it directly to local stations, premiering the new version on January 3, 1987, midway through the 1986 to 1987 season.

The rebuild was drastic. Only Baio and Aames came back. The story simply moved the old family out of the country and a new one in: Charles returns from summer vacation to find strangers in the Pembroke house, learns the Pembrokes have decamped to Seattle, and discovers the new tenants, the Powells, have sublet the place and kept him with it. A mother, a grandfather, and three more children replaced the originals. Charles gained a mother of his own on screen, Lillian, played by Ellen Travolta, who had already played mother to a Baio character twice before on Happy Days and Joanie Loves Chachi.

Four syndicated seasons followed at 26 episodes each, ending November 10, 1990. The show ran more than four times longer in syndication than it had on the network that cancelled it. That is why this title matters to the era: it is the clean precedent for the whole first-run syndication cohort, a show whose real life began after its network death.

The room where scripts disappeared

The most vivid surviving accounts of working on Charles in Charge come from two writers who went on to run some of the biggest comedies in television, and both accounts are about their work being erased.

Chuck Lorre, later the co-creator of The Big Bang Theory, told the Television Academy Foundation in an interview conducted on February 25, 2012 that this show was where his scripts first got bought. "I got to write, as a freelance writer, I got a couple of assignments to write for a show called Charles in Charge with Scott Baio," he said.

Then he went to the taping. "I remember going to the taping of the show, and I did not recognize one line of dialogue from the show they shot, from the script I gave them."

What makes the story is his reaction, which was not injury. "Yet, I was very proud. I was sitting there, yay, this is my script." The rewrite was total, and the outcome was good for everyone: "It was an entirely different script, and they were happy with it. And I got to write another one." It also opened the door that mattered. "The guy who created that show, Michael Jacobs, told me that he was going to produce a pilot, and I could come work on the pilot."

Al Jean, later the long-running showrunner of The Simpsons, had the same experience and kept a tighter tally. He and his writing partner were trying to broaden their range, he told the Television Academy Foundation on March 13, 2013: "Charles in Charge is a good example where we were originally saying we should try to get into more conventional shows, so we pitched to them."

The result: "The episode with our credit on it has one line by us." He remembers exactly which line, and it is the joke that survived the rewrite. "There was a kid in a wizard suit, and I pitched him saying, I'm going to leave for 1,000 years, and then they pitched him saying, okay, come back with milk. That's my Charles in Charge credit."

Jean also explains why writers like him were pitching a family sitcom at all. Coming off an airplane spoof and a sketch show, he said, "we were kind of pigeonholed in the 80s as writers of goofy things," and conventional half hours were the way out of that box.

Two writers, two archived interviews a year apart, and the identical story: Charles in Charge bought the pitch, kept the premise, and rewrote nearly every word. It was a machine for producing episodes on schedule, and it treated freelance scripts as raw material.

"Nobody made a federal case out of it"

From the director's chair the same quality reads as a virtue. Bob Claver, a veteran comedy director, was asked about the show in a Television Academy Foundation interview conducted on October 11, 2004, and his answer is the most concise description anyone has given of what this production was like: "it was simple, nobody made a federal case out of it, and we got on with it."

He remembered the leads warmly, singling out Baio and Aames, and said plainly that he liked working on it. A show grinding out 26 episodes a season for syndication could not afford agony, and by Claver's account it did not have any.

How the telling has grown over the decades

• October 11, 2004, Television Academy Foundation. Bob Claver's interview supplies the production temperature from the direction side: an easy, unfussy show that got made without drama.
• February 25, 2012, Television Academy Foundation. Chuck Lorre's interview places Charles in Charge at the start of his career as the first show to buy his scripts, records that not one line of his dialogue survived to air, and credits creator Michael Jacobs with the introduction that led to his first pilot.
• March 13, 2013, Television Academy Foundation. Al Jean's interview independently confirms the pattern a year later, with the exact surviving line and the reason he and his partner were pitching conventional sitcoms in the first place.

The honest gap in this record is worth stating: none of the three makers reached here tells the part of the story the show is actually famous for. The cancellation, Universal's decision to revive it for syndication, and the wholesale swap of the cast come from the archival record, not from anyone's own telling. Michael Jacobs, Barbara Weisberg, and Al Burton have no interview in that archive, and no first person account of the revival decision surfaced for this piece. So the writers' room is told in makers' words and the business story is told in documents, and this page does not blur which is which.

There is no real conflict between the three tellings, which is itself informative. Lorre and Jean describe the same experience from separate careers and separate years without contradicting each other, and Claver's version of a frictionless set is exactly what a show that rewrites everything in-house and shoots 26 a year would look like from the floor.

The honest bottom line

Charles in Charge was not good, and nobody involved has claimed otherwise. It lost its hour to a stuntman show and a Michael Landon drama, got cut after one season, and came back only because syndication was buying dead network sitcoms cheap. Its solution to losing an entire cast was to move one family to Seattle and drop another into the same house, which is the kind of fix a show attempts when the format matters more than the people in it. Its writers' room bought outside scripts and rewrote them to the studs. And it worked. It ran four more years after CBS was done with it, finished with 126 episodes, and became the template every cancelled show has quietly hoped to follow ever since. Two writers who would later run enormous hits both learned the business inside it, and neither remembers being bitter about the erasure. Lorre's summary of the near miss that sent him into comedy at all is the right note for the whole show: another door "did not open," so he walked through this one instead.

Sources

• Television Academy Foundation, The Interviews, Chuck Lorre, interview conducted by Nancy Harrington on February 25, 2012 in Pacific Palisades, CA.
• Television Academy Foundation, The Interviews, Al Jean, interview conducted by Amy Harrington on March 13, 2013 in Los Angeles, CA.
• Television Academy Foundation, The Interviews, Bob Claver, interview conducted by Karen Herman on October 11, 2004 in Chicago, IL.
• Wikipedia, "Charles in Charge" (creators, production companies, CBS and syndication run dates, timeslot and competition, hiatus and burn-off dates, season and episode counts, cast changes in the revival), cross-checked against the interviews above.

More show stories live at /full-story/. Related: the full story of Small Wonder and the full story of Fun House.

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