The Ropers

The Ropers is an American sitcom that aired on ABC from March 13, 1979 to May 22, 1980. It is a spin-off of Three's Company and loosely based on the British sitcom George and Mildred, which was itself a spin-off of Man About the House, on which Three's Company was based.

It was taped at CBS Television City in Hollywood, California, where its parent series, Three's Company, was taping at the time, from February to April 1979 (Season 1) and from July 1979 to February 1980 (Season 2).^[1]

Plot

The series focused on middle-aged couple Stanley (Norman Fell) and Helen Roper (Audra Lindley), who were landlords to Jack, Janet and Chrissy on Three's Company.

In this spin-off, the Ropers have sold their apartment building in Three's Company episode "An Anniversary Surprise" (season 3, episode 20) to live in the upmarket community of Cheviot Hills, where the social-climbing Helen struggled to fit in with her neighbors. Stanley made little attempt to fit in with the standards of the community, thereby causing Helen much embarrassment.

As was the case during their time on Three's Company, opening credits for The Ropers alternate between Audra Lindley and Norman Fell credited first.

Characters

Main characters

• Stanley Roper (Norman Fell)—A lower-middle-class, frugal, and often embarrassing retiree, who moved to Cheviot Hills after he is duped into buying a townhouse.
• Helen Roper (Audra Lindley)—A sexually frustrated, social-climbing middle-aged woman who tries to fit in the community despite her husband Stanley's constant boorishness. Despite her attempts to fit in, she often proves herself to be as bumbling as her husband.
• Jeffrey P. Brookes III (Jeffrey Tambor)—The snobbish realtor who is also the Ropers' next-door neighbor.
• Anne Brookes (Patricia McCormack)—Brookes' long-suffering, down-to-earth homemaker wife, who looks after the house and their young son David. She and Helen become friendly, despite their husbands' frequently adversarial relationship with one another.
• David Brookes (Evan Cohen)—Jeffrey and Anne Brookes' 7-year-old son that is always tempted to bother Mr. Roper, which his parents don't approve.

Recurring characters

• Jenny Ballinger (Louise Vallance)—A young woman who had been living in the Ropers' storeroom
• Ethel Ambrewster (Dena Dietrich)—Helen's snobby elder sister; gives her an air kiss every time she sees Helen
• Hubert Ambrewster (Rod Colbin)—Ethel's husband and Helen's brother-in-law
• Debbie Hopper (Lois Areno)—The girl Stanley sees at the hot tub in the neighborhood
• Joey (Richard B. Shull)—Stanley's best friend and one of Helen's enemies
• Hilda (Lucy Lee Flippin/Darcy Pulliam)—Helen's sister who has 5 children and 1 on the way with her husband Freddy
• Mother (Lucille Benson)—Helen, Hilda and Ethel's mother

Creation

After the enormous success of Three's Company in its short first season in 1977, ABC head Fred Silverman was anxious to capitalize on the show's success. In early 1977, Silverman approached Fell and Lindley with the subject of doing a spin-off from the show after its first full season wrapped in the spring of 1978. Both actors as well as the Three's Company producers begged off as the show had yet to prove itself for an entire season. However, with the show's continued success in its second season, the idea was brought up again in 1978, this time by Three's Company's own producers as well as new ABC head Tony Thomopolous (Silverman went to NBC). The idea intrigued Lindley, but Fell was extremely reluctant, as he was satisfied with his role on a show that was already a proven hit. Fell feared that a spin-off would be unsuccessful and thus put him out of a good role and job. To alleviate his fears, Three's Company producers contractually promised Fell that they would give the new series a year to prove itself. If unsuccessful, then he and Lindley would return to Three's Company. A reluctant Fell agreed to the new terms.

Like Three's Company, The Ropers was introduced as a late season replacement series in the spring of 1979 premiering the same night as Three's Company on ABC's successful Tuesday night lineup, airing at 10pm. In its first season, the ratings for the show were very high (the show finished at #8 for the 1978-79 season), and had the second-highest series premiere rating at the time.^[2] After the season premiere, Three's Company went on hiatus, but The Ropers still did well. ABC reran the episodes over the summer of 1979 (in August on Sundays) where they continued to achieve high ratings leading many to believe that the show would have a long run.

Cancellation

At the beginning of the 1979-80 season, however, ABC moved the show to Saturdays at 8pm, resulting in an audience drop which put it near the bottom of the ratings. Being placed on Saturday nights, rather than on the ABC Tuesday night lineup, caused an immediate fall into the bottom ten (#52 out of 61 shows for the week of September 17–23, its second week of the season) as the show was in direct competition with the NBC show CHiPs. The show later moved to 8:30pm on Saturdays by January 1980. The move upset Fell to the point that he actually went to ABC headquarters in New York to plead with the network to move the show to a better time slot. His effort was in vain, however, and the show continued to pull in low ratings. The drop in ratings and the fact that the show wasn't pulling in the key young demographic audience, led to announcement of the show's cancellation by ABC in May 1980. The last three episodes aired Thursdays at 9:30pm after Barney Miller in May 1980. Audra Lindley stated in Chris Mann's 1997 book about Three's Company, that she was surprised that The Ropers had been canceled after a late season surge in the series ratings that allowed it to finish the 1979-80 season at number 25; however, the Nielsen ratings for that year list the series Soap at number 25.^[2]

With the series canceled, Fell approached Three's Company producers about returning to the show. During the time that The Ropers was on the air, the characters had been replaced on Three's Company by Ralph Furley (Don Knotts). The addition had worked well and Three's Company had retained its popularity. The idea of returning Fell and Lindley to their original Three's Company roles was undesirable to producers, mainly because they had one character playing the landlord role now as opposed to two, which would require more money to be paid out per episode, (the cancellation of The Ropers came just as Suzanne Somers began to renegotiate her contract, which would lead to her very public contract dispute during the 1980-81 television season), something that was undesirable to the show's producers and ABC. The cancellation of The Ropers came just one month after the one-year contractual deadline had passed. Fell would later state that he always believed the decision to pull the plug on the show had been made much earlier, but that the network deliberately postponed making the cancellation official until after the one-year mark specifically to be relieved of the obligation to allow Fell and Lindley to return to Three's Company. There was an attempt by producers to sell the show to Silverman over at NBC; however, Silverman passed on it too.

Despite the hard feelings, in March 1981 both Fell and Lindley made one final guest appearance on Three's Company (in season 5, episode #96) nearly a year after the end of their own series before the characters were retired for good. For audiences, it was a chance to see all of the three landlord characters — played by Fell, Lindley, and Knotts — on the same stage. In this episode it was explained that the Ropers had moved to the San Francisco Bay area.

Tambor appeared on the show that same season playing a different character, a wealthy but unwelcome suitor of Chrissy's cousin Cindy (#5.13).

The show was ranked number two on Time magazine's "Top 10 Worst TV Spin-Offs".^[3]

In July 2002 TV Guide named The Ropers the 49th worst TV series of all time.^[4]

Episodes

Season 1 (1979)

Season 2 (1979–80)

Syndication

The Ropers has been aired in syndication on local channels in the 1980s and early 1990s, but has had limited airings in recent years, likely because, due to its relatively short network run—roughly a season and a half—there aren't enough episodes to strip the show. Two episodes of the series, however, play in the syndication package of Three's Company. When initially offered in syndication, the series ran under the title Three's Company's Friends, The Ropers. That version used an instrumental version of the original series' theme song. Six episodes of the series were aired on TV Land in September 2006, and four episodes were aired on WGN America in October 2008.

Beginning in January 2011 Antenna TV, a television network designed for digital television subchannels and owned by Tribune Broadcasting, aired the sitcom.^[5] The series started on Tuesday, February 15, 2011, and went through one entire rotation of all episodes before being removed from the lineup.^[6] On August 29, 2011, the show returned to the lineup as the Three's Company cycle again came to the point of the series where the Ropers left.

Antenna TV usually shows back-to-back episodes of Three's Company. But when the cycle comes to the point of the Ropers' departure, the network then airs The Ropers following a single episode of Three's Company until the end of the Ropers cycle, then resumes the back-to-back Three's Company airings.

References

External links

• The Ropers at the Internet Movie Database
• The Ropers at TV.com
• Sitcoms Online: The Ropers