You take the good, you take the bad, add more bad, it’s all now bad, and that’s… Kind of where that alleged
reboot is hanging at these days. That’s per original series star Mindy Cohn, who claimed in a recent interview that an attempt to revive the beloved ’80s sitcom—originally spearheaded by
broadcasts from deep in the lockdown years garnered surprisingly good ratings—is now “very dead” due to the “greed” of an unnamed castmate.
We’ll cut to the most disappointing part for gossip hounds immediately: Cohn never gives up the identity of which of her co-stars she accuses of sabotaging the effort, by trying to go back behind everybody else’s backs to get their own individual revival show. (She suggests she’s not following the person in question on Instagram, but a quick search of her feed shows that Kim Fields, Lisa Whelchel, and Nancy McKeon, who were, alongside the late Charlotte Rae, the show’s most consistent stars, are all represented.)
Speaking on SiriusXM’s Jeff Lewis Live, Cohn stated that, after Lear approached them in the wake of the “Live” episode (which starred Jennifer Aniston, Gabrielle Union, Ann Dowd, Allison Tolman, and Kathryn Hahn, and was paired up with a live episode of Diff’rent Strokes), “We got into talks and we hired a writer and the four of us got together on Zooms. This was during Covid, and we had meetings with Norman about it.” But then, Cohen says, the ultimate fact of life reared its head: Betrayal “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, who’s currently serving in a recurring capacity on AppleTV+’s Palm Royale, says that the aftermath has been pretty emotionally rough for all involved. “I’m just saying it was for a 40-year friendship and sisterhood, there was tidal wave of emotion around it… A couple of people can’t move past it, don’t want to move past it. We are not as united. Let me put it that way. We were united for 40 years over not talking about each other, not doing dirty, not, you know, all for one, one for all, and this kind of wrecked that, which is sad. Really sad.”
