Townies (1996)

Molly Ringwald’s return to sitcom after 16 years away…

Created by: Matthew Carlson Starring: Molly Ringwald, Jenna Elfman, Lauren Graham, Ron Livingston, Bill Burr, Conchata Ferrell, Joseph D. Reitman, Lee Garlington, Dion Anderson

In 2006, a special aired on former music-only channel VH1 that counted down the Top 100 Greatest Teen Stars. The special aired over five consecutive nights. The countdown ranked a list of teen stars taken from the 1970’s to the 1990’s. After five nights and five hours of programming, VH1 declared that the greatest teen star of all time was Molly Ringwald. Ms Ringwald beat out Britney Spears, Shannen Doherty and fellow ‘Brat Pack’ members Rob Lowe and Anthony Michael Hall to claim this much-vaunted crown. For many people, this result would not come as a surprise. When people talk about someone as a ‘teen star’, Molly Ringwald’s name is normally one of the first to come up in conversation. Like many of her ‘Brat Pack’ cohorts, Ringwald shot to the top of the box office in the mid-1980s thanks to a series of coming-of-age films written by the late great John Hughes. She especially became one of the major faces for young people in cinema. Either side of the ensemble piece The Breakfast Club (1985), Molly found success as the solo lead in comedies Sixteen Candles (1984) and Pretty in Pink (1986). She even made the front covers of LIFE and TIME Magazine in March and May 1986 respectively.

Follow-up roles in The Pick-Up Artist (1987) and For Keeps (1988) received more mixed reviews and fared worse at the box office compared to her prior roles and bottomed out with commercial and critical failures Fresh Horses (1988) and Strike It Rich (1990). At the same time, she had reportedly turned down the lead roles in both Ghost and Pretty Woman, two of the three highest-grossing films of 1990 which gave international stardom to eventual leads Demi Moore and Julia Roberts.

Fast-forward to 1996 and Molly Ringwald did not have the international stardom she had attained a decade earlier. She was still a big name, having earned praise for her role in the critically acclaimed 1994 adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand but her more notable roles had been earned in TV movies including Women & Men: Stories of Seduction (1990) and Something to Live for: The Alison Gertz Story (1992). For her next project, Molly Ringwald decided to return to television sitcoms for the first time in 16 years. She had originally played the role of Molly Parker in the first season of The Facts of Life before being written out of the show entirely. Enter Townies.

Townies was a short-lived sitcom that aired on ABC in the autumn of 1996. The premise of the show according to Carsey-Werner.net is as follows: ‘Molly Ringwald stars as Carrie Donovan in this hilarious ensemble comedy set in the quaint fishing town of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Carrie leads a group of life-long friends who must make the leap from “twenty-somethings” to adulthood. Not as outrageous as the free-spirited Shannon, and not ready to settle down like her straight-laced friend Denise, Carrie faces a series of comical setbacks while trying to keep it together. In a place where “everything smells like fish”, these friends for life share hope, laughter and the frustrations of having big dreams in a small town’. Starring alongside Molly Ringwald (Carrie Donovan) were two virtually unknown actors who would later find success come the end of the decade. The two actors in question were Jenna Elfman (Shannon Canotis) and Lauren Graham (Denise Callahan). Compared to Ringwald’s recent TV work, Elfman and Graham could still be seen as up-and-comers. Jenna Elfman’s prior work had consisted of guest appearances as a ‘psychedelic girl’ on The George Carlin Show (1994) and a more notable appearance as a hitchhiker in a Season 8 episode of Roseanne titled ‘The Getaway, Almost’ where Roseanne and Jackie fall into the roles of Thelma and Louise. Lauren Graham’s work had been more high-profile, appearing in a five episode run in the first series of Caroline in the City (1995-96) as Shelly, the girlfriend of Richard Karinsky (Malcolm Gets) and appeared in the third ever episode of 3rd Rock From The Sun (1996) as Lori, a student that Dick (John Lithgow) takes a liking to, causing him to examine the human ageing process. Joining this trio were more future stars including Conchata Ferrell (Two and a Half Men) as Marge, the owner of the restaurant the trio work in, Ron Livingston (Office Space) as Kurt, Carrie’s love interest and Bill Burr (in his acting debut) as Ryan, Denise’s husband.

Townies was created by Matthew Carlson, a former writer and producer of The Wonder Years. The show’s writing team included Carlson, Bruce Rasmussen (Anything But Love, Wings) and Linwood Boomer (Night Court), the future creator of Malcolm in the Middle. All of the series episodes were directed by Pamela Fryman who would later become known for her work on How I Met Your Mother. It was executive produced by Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner, who had produced such hits as A Different World, Grace Under Fire and Roseanne. The show’s theme song was even created by Jonathan Wolff, the man behind the music of Seinfeld. So what went wrong? In order to find out, this reviewer will watch the show’s pilot episode, which aired in September 1996, to see if the show deserved better or deservedly received its just desserts.

The plot of the pilot episode focuses on the days leading up to Denise’s (Graham) impending marriage to Ryan (Burr). Scenes focus on the bachelor(ette) party, dress fittings, the night before and the wedding day itself. Meanwhile, Carrie (Ringwald) has to rebuff the advances of Kurt (Livingston) on repeated occasions and Shannon (Elfman) deals with the return of Denise’s brother Danny (guest star Patrick Fabian), her ex-boyfriend who had left town years earlier and had gotten engaged in the meantime, who now wants to rekindle the embers of their forgotten romance.

The first episode is fine. There isn’t anything particularly special in the show’s humour or its characters and their particular personalities but the pilot does what it needs to do. It establishes the situation in the comedy and the characters, their personalities and their relationships to one another are fleshed out well enough. I do give the show credit for have the plot of the first episode be around a wedding, something that normally happens in a season finale. Through the lens of Denise’s wedding, the attitudes of Carrie, Denise and Shannon are explained. Denise wants to settle down with her husband and newborn baby. Shannon wants to experience life (she almost leaves a naked man alone in her apartment early in the episode) and is the free spirit of the three. Carrie is in the middle, and finds herself in the middle of her two friends. The episode’s climax involves Carrie having to reunite the two after Denise removed Shannon as her bridesmaid due to a misunderstanding involving herself and Danny. Humour-wise, the episode on the whole produced more smiles than laughs. A couple of big laughs were had, especially when Shannon was forced to publicly show her leg in the restaurant to prove something to Denise, and slick camera trickery zooms in on a young boy gawking at it. From this embryotic first episode, Ron Livingston’s Kurt is the MVP, hitting it out of the park with most of the lines he is given. The rest of the main cast are simply good in their first appearances, but it is clear the show needs time to click. However, the cast and characters are fairly likeable. I would give the pilot a slight recommend and probably would have returned the next week back in 1996. Unfortunately, the only other episodes available to me besides the pilot episodes are episodes 11 and 12, which were never aired, including a decent Xmas special.

Townies aired on ABC on Wednesday nights at 8:30pm between episodes of the fourth seasons of top 30 show Ellen and Grace Under Fire. The previous television season, the 8:30 timeslot had been occupied by three different shows: the first series of The Drew Carey Show and the two short-lived sitcoms The Faculty with Meredith Baxter and Hudson Street with Tony Danza and Lori Loughlin. ABC had not had a hit in that very timeslot since the cancellation of Doogie Howser M.D. in 1993. Townies had a task on its hands. So how was it and how did it do?

Unfortunately, the show did not catch on. After initially airing in September 1996, 15 episodes had been produced before the show was officially cancelled by NBC in December with only 10 episodes having aired. In its timeslot, the show had to compete for ratings with Fox’s Beverly Hills 90210 (#53 in the ratings), short-lived sitcoms Almost Perfect and Pearl on CBS and The John Larroquette Show on NBC, all of whom were struggling or falling in the ratings. One of the reasons that could be attributing to the show’s abrupt showing was its positioning in ABC’s schedule. An LA Times article from the time stated that Townies “flunked the values check” for its timeslot, with its breezy approach to casual sex placing it squarely in the cross hairs of those blasting mainstream TV’s thoughtless programming at hours when kids are most likely to be watching.” Despite heavy research, no information can be found on the ratings that the shows received during its run, but these could have played a part in the show’s demise along with the problematic scheduled. Nevertheless, the show aired its tenth and final episode ‘I’m With Stupid’ on 4th December 1996. The next week, the show was replaced by the final season of Coach.

So what happened to the stars of Townies? In the immediate aftermath, Molly Ringwald starred in the comedy-horror Office Killer with Jeanne Tripplehorn and Carol Kane and the 1998 TV movie Twice Upon a Time, which may be reviewed at a later time. Before Gilmore Girls, Lauren Graham had multiple episode appearances on NewsRadio and Law and Order, starred in two more failed sitcoms in Conrad Bloom (1998) and M.Y.O.B. (2000) and appeared as Jerry’s girlfriend the Seinfeld episode ‘The Millenium’ (1997). And Jenna Elfman? She had a small supporting role in 1997’s Grosse Pointe Blank, nothing much else.

So Molly Ringwald didn’t manage to replicate her ’80s big-screen success in the mid-1990s sitcom world. On the positive side, ABC would not have to wait long to end their bad run of form in their Wednesday night 8:30pm timeslot. The following season, the timeslot would produce a show that landed at #25 in the ratings, a little show called Dharma and Greg. This show starred Jenna Elfman. Too bad Townies wasn’t a success though. It would have given her career the real shot in the arm that it really needed.