<\/p>\n
“The Facts of Life” ended up being a success for NBC at a time when it didn’t have many of those. But before it could premiere, it had to get a cast together, and that required spinning off an actor from another successful sitcom; that actor was Charlotte Rae who played Mrs. Edna Garrett, the Drummonds’ housekeeper, on “Diff’rent Strokes.” Mrs. Garrett was picked to lead the spinoff because she was enough of a draw that she would attract eyeballs to “The Facts of Life,” but not enough of a loss that “Diff’rent Strokes” would suffer for it.<\/p>\n
Charlotte Rae\u00a0talked to Entertainment Weekly<\/a> for an oral history of “The Facts of Life,” and she explained that, after Fred Silverman took over CBS and ABC as president, and then took over NBC, he was planning to make it the best network on TV. “When I was on ‘Diff’rent Strokes,’ he remembered me from ‘Car 54, Where Are You?’ —\u00a0I had the part of Sylvia Schnauser in that, playing the wife of Al Lewis, who went on to [play Grandpa on] ‘The Munsters’ —\u00a0and he knew I could deliver, so he decided he wanted to spin me off.”<\/p>\n For Silverman, the choice of Rae was simple: “‘Diff’rent Strokes’ was one of the few successful comedies we had on NBC, so I decided that would be the ideal choice as a vehicle for a spinoff,” he said. “I thought there was enough there that we could weather her loss, and then she could still make guest appearances. So we effected a spinoff very, very quickly \u2014 I think we went on the air within a year of the time that ‘Diff’rent Strokes’ premiered \u2014 and it was an instant success, which in those days was quite rare for NBC.”<\/p>\n Read on to find out what “The Facts of Life” was about and what its ratings were really like.<\/p>\n Read more: The Untold Truth Of Bones<\/a><\/p>\nWhat was The Facts of Life about?<\/h2>\n