Sister, Sister
Identical twins separated at birth, reunited as teenagers, and determined never to be split up again. Sister, Sister made real-life twins Tia and Tamera Mowry Friday-night royalty — first on ABC, then on The WB — and gave television one of its great unanimous verdicts: "Go home, Roger!"
Created by Kim Bass, Gary Gilbert, and Fred Shafferman, Sister, Sister premiered on ABC on April 1, 1994, with a premise straight out of a fairy tale: identical twin girls, adopted separately as babies, stumble into each other as teenagers and refuse to be separated again. Tia Landry (Tia Mowry) had grown up in inner-city Detroit with her flashy, fashion-obsessed adoptive mother Lisa (Jackée Harry); Tamera Campbell (Tamera Mowry) was raised in the suburbs by her buttoned-up adoptive father Ray (Tim Reid). The reunion crammed both households under one roof, and the show mined every ounce of the odd-couple arrangement — street-smart mom versus straight-laced dad, identical faces with opposite personalities.
ABC dropped the series in 1995, but The WB picked it up that September and kept it running four more seasons, 119 episodes in all, before the finale aired on May 23, 1999. Along the way the show minted a legendary running gag: Marques Houston's Roger Evans, the lovesick boy next door, whose every uninvited appearance ended with the twins shouting in unison, "Go home, Roger!" Houston — who was simultaneously singing in the R&B group Immature — later said the catchphrase started overtaking his music career, and it became his reason for leaving the show.
Sister, Sister became one of the defining Black family sitcoms of the 1990s and a cornerstone of The WB's mid-decade lineup, and the Mowry twins essentially grew up on screen across its six seasons. A revival was announced in 2018 but had quietly died by 2019 over rights issues — leaving the original run, twin telepathy jokes and all, exactly where a generation left it.
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