Mindy Cohn says plans for a revival of “The Facts of Life” have officially been scrapped due to some unforeseen “drama” with a former co-star.
Appearing on SiriusXM’s “Jeff Lewis Live” this week, Cohn said talks about a revival of the beloved sitcom ramped up in the wake of the 2021 ABC special “Live in Front of a Studio Audience,” which featured an all-star re-creation of a classic episode.
The success of that special, Cohn explained, sparked the interest of producer Norman Lear, who quickly got in touch with her and her surviving cast mates Kim Fields, Nancy McKeon and Lisa Whelchel. (Lear died in December.)
“We got into talks and we hired a writer, and the four of us got together on Zoom,” she said. “This was during COVID, and we had meetings with Norman about it.”
Those discussions fell apart, however, after one of the actors allegedly attempted to seek out a different opportunity that would’ve involved her character from the series, which ran from 1979 to 1988.
“One of the girls went behind our backs, tried to make a separate deal for a spinoff just for herself, and devastated the rest of us,” Cohn said. “For a 40-year friendship and sisterhood, there was a tidal wave of emotion around it.”
She went on to note: “She was a greedy bitch. I’ll say it.”
“The Facts of Life” was initially conceived as a spinoff of “Diff’rent Strokes” and focused primarily on the character of Edna Garrett (played by the late actor Charlotte Rae). The series followed Edna as she became a housemother at a private all-girls school in upstate New York.
The students under her watch included the spoiled Blair Warner (Whelchel), the gossipy Tootie Ramsey (Fields) and the naive Natalie Green (Cohn).
Cohn, who recently appeared in the AppleTV+ series “Palm Royale,” notably did not identify which of her co-stars was responsible for the demise of the “Facts of Life” revival. But she said Lewis and his co-hosts “could guess” based on her recent social media activity.
After the SiriusXM interview aired, fans began speculating Cohn may have been referring to Fields, who was noticeably absent when Cohn, McKeon and Whelchel appeared on “The Drew Barrymore Show” in February. Others suggested it was Whelchel, who wasn’t included in a group photo with Fields and McKeon that Cohn shared on Instagram in 2022.
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