Norman Fell Got Screwed By ‘Three’s Company’ Spin-off

Norman Fell never wanted to leave Three’s Company.

Why would he? As impotent landlord Stanley Roper, he was finally on a hit TV show after years of playing smaller parts on programs featuring cops and detectives. Three’s Company was a smash, and he was the sitcom’s most consistently funny character.

But ABC executive Fred Silverman, who never saw a success that he didn’t think he could clone, wanted more. Before the show’s first season was over, he approached Fell and Audra Lindley, who played sexually frustrated Helen Roper, about starring in their own sitcom. Thanks but no thanks, said the actors, who wanted to stay with the show that was already a hit.

During the show’s second season, Silverman came calling again. Do the spin-off, he said, promising that the couple could always return to Three’s Company if The Ropers failed to take off. Finally, Fell and Lindley agreed. 

The gamble appeared to pay off. In The Ropers, Stanley and Helen move into a swanky townhouse in a better neighborhood, populated by snooty neighbors such as young Jeffrey Tambor. Like Three’s Company, The Ropers were introduced as a mid-season replacement. It was instantly a smash, finishing as the #8 show on television for the 1978-1979 season. 

But things tumbled downhill once the show began its first full season. A loveless marriage was a funny subplot on Three’s Company, but proved depressing as the show’s main storyline. The Ropers was moved to Saturdays, “a killer time when everyone’s out to dinner,” Fell explained in Come and Knock On Our Door: A Hers and Hers and His Guide to Three’s Company. By midseason, The Ropers was out of the top 20 shows. Fell even went to ABC headquarters in New York to beg for a better time slot, but he was rebuffed.

Fell’s worst fears came true. First, The Ropers was axed despite still-respectable ratings. “We were #25, and we were canceled,” lamented Lindley, who wasn’t as bothered by the news. “I never want to get stuck in a hit. You end up playing one role for years and years and years.”

That kind of job security was exactly what Fell wanted. But producers reneged on their promise to return the couple to Three’s Company. Fell remembered the official explanation: “First of all, you and Audra are too expensive; we have one person playing that part now.” (That was Don Knotts as twitchy new landlord Mr. Furley.)

Plus, the producers said, “the ratings are holding up. There’s no reason, if we want to be sensible about it, to make any changes.”

Fell was heartbroken. “I missed John (Ritter),” he said. “I missed bouncing things off him.”

He even got grief from his showbiz buddies. “I did the Johnny Carson show and he said, ‘That was a schmucky thing to do, leaving a hit show and doing a spin-off,’” Fell remembered. “I said, ‘But there’s a story behind that!’”

Eventually, Fell moved on. “I put it behind me,” he explained. “I was upset about it, but I gave myself a day or so to be moody. Yeah, I could have gone on in Three’s Company for another five or six years but…”

Sounds like it took more than a day or two to get over the disappointment.