Blossom
NBC's sitcom about Mayim Bialik's Blossom Russo, her musician dad, a brother whose catchphrase was "Whoa!" and a best friend, Six, who never stopped talking. It also made flowered floppy hats and baby-doll dresses a trend.
Blossom started out as a show about a boy. Creator Don Reo got the idea at a family party thrown by his old friend Dion DiMucci, of Dion and the Belmonts, where he watched a "hip, with-it musician father" with his kids. He added a teenage hero modeled on Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye and pitched it to NBC in 1989 as Richie. NBC liked the script, but executive Leslie Lurie suggested making the lead a girl "because of the overabundance of coming-of-age stories with boys." In the series finale, Blossom calls herself a "teenage Holden Caulfield."
NBC aired the pilot as a special on July 5, 1990. It ranked third for the week in the Nielsen ratings, and the series premiered as a midseason replacement on January 3, 1991. By then the parents had been recast, and the show had become the family Reo first imagined. Blossom (Mayim Bialik) lives with her divorced father Nick (Ted Wass), a session musician, after her mother leaves. Her brother Tony (Michael Stoyanov) is a recovering addict, and her brother Joey (Joey Lawrence) is a dim jock with an exaggerated "Whoa!" Jenna von Oÿ played Six, her fast-talking best friend. The opening had Blossom dancing to "My Opinionation," sung by Dr. John, and in fantasy sequences celebrities dropped by with advice: Mr. T, Phylicia Rashad, ALF, Will Smith.
The clothes mattered as much as the scripts. Costume designer Sherry Thompson pulled about six outfits per episode from Melrose Avenue boutiques and chain stores, and Blossom and Six became trendsetters for flowered floppy hats, baby-doll dresses and sundresses. An official Blossom clothing line reached department stores in 1993. The show was also praised for taking on addiction, sex and depression: Tony's recovery was part of the story from the start, and an episode called "Blue Blossom" was about Blossom being depressed.
Blossom ran five seasons and 114 episodes, ending on May 22, 1995. Bialik later said it was "the first network show I knew about at that time that was about a girl." She went on to The Big Bang Theory, and when von Oÿ, Lawrence and Stoyanov reunited on her Fox sitcom Call Me Kat in 2022, the only things they referenced from the old show were the hats and the opening dance numbers.
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