Family Matters

Family Matters began as a spin-off of Perfect Strangers, where Jo Marie Payton's Harriette Winslow had been the elevator operator at the newspaper where Larry and Balki worked. Created by William Bickley and Michael Warren, it launched on ABC's Friday "TGIF" block on September 22, 1989, with Reginald VelJohnson as Chicago police officer Carl Winslow, heading a middle-class Black household that included the couple's kids Eddie, Laura, and Judy.

Steve Urkel arrived midway through the first season as a one-off guest — the nerdy, accident-prone kid next door. Jaleel White's performance struck something vital: the physical comedy, the desperate attempts to fit in, the trademark "Did I do that?" after every mishap. He became the breakout character, then effectively a protagonist, with episodes increasingly built around his malfunctioning inventions and the property damage they left behind. White eventually played multiple personas, including Steve's suave alter-ego Stefan Urquelle and his cousin Myrtle Urkel. As Urkel swallowed the show, youngest daughter Judy quietly vanished after season four — retconned out of existence, never mentioned again, one of TV's most infamous disappearing acts.

The series was a TGIF mainstay through 1997, then moved to CBS for its ninth and final season in that network's Block Party lineup, ending in July 1998 after 215 episodes. The Winslows remained the nominal heart of the show, but it was Urkel's gravitational pull that defined it in cultural memory — a supporting character who became the whole reason a generation tuned in on Friday nights.