Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries - We Got It Made: TV Guide Cover For March 31,1984

We got it Made aired from September 1983 until March 1984 on NBC and from September 1987 until September 1988 in first run syndication.

Frothy comedy in which two young New York City bachelors hired a sexy live-in maid to clean up their sloppy apartment. David ( Matt McCoy) was a button-down lawyer disgusted by the mess created by goofy roommate Jay ( Tom Villard), a free-thinking importer and "idea man." Along came Mickey ( Teri Copley), a bubbly and aparently air-headed blonde who just happened to be crackerjack housekeeper. David and Jay's girlfriends ( neurotic Claudia and ingenious Beth played by Stepfanie Kramer and Bonnie Urseth) were naturally suspicious, but it was all quite innocent-of course.

Writing in the Boston Globe , critic Jack Thomas proclaimed We Got it Made as "This year's absolutely , positively unchallenged worst new show." Nonetheless, the series premiere telecast ranked second for the week. Ratings eventually fell though and the series was canceled in March 1984.

Three years after leaving NBC, We Got it Made surfaced again with new episodes in first run syndication. The relationship between Mickey and her bosses had not changed ( even though David was now played by John Hillner) but David and Jay's girlfriends were gone. New to the cast were Max ( Ron Karabatsos), a cop living in the apartment across the hall, and his awkward teenage son, Max Jr. ( Lance Wilson-White), who had the hots for Mickey, often sought her advice about dealing with women.

A Review from TV Guide ( Nov. 12-18, 1983 Ed.)

Review by Robert MacKenzie

This bit of fluff from NBC has been panned from Coast to Coast, but that's not the only reason I decided to like it. It features the cutest blonde in television, and who needs a better reason than that.

Marilyn Monroe set the eternal standard for dumb, luscious blondes, and all the cream puffs who followed her have been poor imitations. Teri Copley is not only a good imitation, with all the kewpie doll mannerisms Marilyn invented, she's also adorable in her own right: dewey eyed and pouty mouthed and curvy with an air of sweet innocence that would melt bricks.

The producers know what they've got here: in fact they're a bit blatant about displaying it. The premiere show included a lingering close-up of Copley's chest. I don't mean her face and chest, just the chest.

The plot, I must admit, is in the distinguished tradition of Three's Company and other airhead pajama comedies. There are these two guys, see, who share an apartment. Their names are David and Jay ( Matt McCoy and Tom Villard). They have steady girlfriends, Claudia and Beth ( Stepfanie Kramer and Bonnie Urseth). In the opener, the boys decide to hire a live-in housekeeper. The luscious Mickey ( Copley) burst into the apartment and nearly out of her sweater, applying for the job. That took the first five minutes; by the second five, Mickey was accidentally locked in the bathroom with the two boys when the girl friends showed up.

By the quarter hour, Mickey had climbed out the window and somehow ended up nude behing a potted plant while David and Jay tried to distract Beth and Claudia. You get the picture.

Titillation is the scientific term for it, but the five young actors are attractive enough, and the lines often funny enough, to keep me mert and mush-brained in a chair for 30 minutes. If my attention starts to wander, they put Copley into a low-cut dress or an unbuttoned shirt, and the brain cells go into coma again.

Naturally Beth and Claudia are suspicious of the new housekeeper. " If there's any laying on of hands, you're dog meat," Claudia warns David. Mickey disarms them with her naivete, but when it turns out that she sleepwalks and climbs into bed with each of the boys, the girl friends turn skeptical again. The boys carried the sleepwalking girl back to her room. "Grab that part," said David indicated Mickey's rear end. "Please," quavered Jay," I'm only flesh and blood."

In one episode the boys were upset to learn that Mickey had taken a job in a nighclub featuring nude dancers. "You mean frontal nudity? " "Yea, and backal." I'm sorry to report that Mickey kept her clothes on; she was only auditioning as a stand-up comic.

This is no parade of stars, but McCoy's smooth lawyerish look plays well against Villard's goofier style as his pal. And I like Kramer's smart Claudia, a good contrast to Urseth's perky type. But this show, when it works, works because of Teri Copley, and it wouldn't work with any of the other Monroe knockoffs I have seen. Feminists of the more humorless persuasion may hate her, but they shouldn't. It takes talent to carry off a convincing dumb act. It wouldn't surprise me to find out that Copley is a very bright young woman. And if she isn't, who cares?

An Article from The New York Times

TV VIEW; THE NETWORKS FLIRT WITH SEXUAL EXPLICITNESS

By JOHN J. O'CONNOR
Published: October 9, 1983

Coping with a gradual but fairly steady erosion in their audience numbers, the three commercial networks are clearly nervous these days, alternating between old patterns and increasingly bold forays into formerly forbidden territory of sexual explicitness. They are being noticeably conservative in the area of weekly series, most of which appear to be clones from past successes - more action-adventures featuring offbeat partners, male, female or any combination thereof, or simply outright imitations along the lines of ''Webster,'' plucked from the entrails of ''Diff'rent Strokes,'' and ''We've Got It Made,'' doing an obvious turn on ''Three's Company.'' But then there are the made-for-TV movies, and these are the vehicles through which the networks are increasingly competing with the greater, and occasionally notorious, permissiveness allowed cable television, not to mention video cassettes and disks.

Unlike commercial television, cable does not use the public airwaves and therefore, at least technically for the time being, is not subject to the Federal Communication Commission's regulations on obscenity, indecency and profanity. As a result, a few cable operators will show X-rated movies that feature outright pornography. The great majority stick with R-rated films, usually accompanied by a warning for parents with children under 17. This convenient state of affairs has given the cable industry an opportunity to provide what it calls more ''adult'' programming to its customers. The language is looser, sometimes subsiding into pointless vulgarity. And the sex scenes are, to put it mildly, more vivid, remaining unchanged from the way they were shown to paying customers in movie theaters.

The result is provoking heated debates between supporters of the new explicitness on the home screen and the naysayers. They will undoubtedly continue going at each other for years. The real bottom line, though, is that a rather large segment of the viewing public is showing a decided preference for the cable product. That is why the traditional networks are losing audiences. A few years ago, William S. Paley, founder of CBS, predicted that the three networks, including ABC and NBC, would lose about 10 percent of their total audience by 1990. They have already lost at least that much, with their share of the market declining from over 90 percent to somewhere just above 80 percent. And cable has so far penetrated only a bit under 40 percent of all the television homes.

What, then, are the commercial networks to do? One obvious answer is to compete directly with cable in offering more ''adult'' material. They must tread carefully, of course, panning the camera to a burning fireplace or crashing sea-waves at more sensitive moments. But, even with the FCC looking over their shoulders, the networks have a surprising amount of latitude. Two recent TV movies demonstrate that much quite neatly. ''Sessions,'' on NBC, was a sympathetic portrait of a high- priced prostitute. And on CBS, ''Secrets of a Mother and Daughter'' had a widow and her troubled daughter stumbling into affairs with the same man. Students of the medium may remember when a similar situation, concocted for the comedy series ''Soap'' several years ago, triggered a national storm of protest. This time around, hardly a murmur was heard in the land.

With Barbara Turner as the writer and supervising producer, ''Sessions'' told the story of Leigh Churchill, a call-girl with two young daughters going to private schools. Leigh's motivation adhered strictly to the standard Freudian book. Her cold and distant father always wanted and never got a son. Leigh develops her own brand of coldness, which takes the form of wanting to be in complete control of any man she might meet. She is confidently adept at the prostitute-client relationship, knowing just what lies to tell a man about his sexual prowess and what drinks and food to serve for the preliminaries. She ''works'' in the best Manhattan neighborhoods, shops in the most elegant stores and eats in the most fashionable restaurants.

Life doesn't look bad for Leigh but, as becomes increasingly apparent, she is on the verge of a breakdown. Most of her story is told in the form of sessions with a psychiatrist. She is being courted by a gentle, patient widower, played with splendid subtlety by Jeffrey DeMunn, but the script refuses to opt for easy answers. What makes 'Sessions'' unusual for commercial television is the frankness of many of the passing details. The peculiar sexual quirks of several of Leigh's passing customers are spelled out with startling clarity. Even a couple of years ago, this kind of material would have been unthinkable on commercial television. Giving ''Sessions'' even more impact than anyone might have anticipated was a powerful performance by Veronica Hamel as Leigh.

''Secrets of a Mother and Daughter'' is a considerably more contrived and silly bit of business. Katharine Ross plays Ava, a starlet in beach/surfing movies in the early 60's and now the widow of a very wealthy corporation lawyer. Her daughter Susan (Linda Hamilton) is having marriage problems and leaves her husband to go live with mom at the family beach place in Malibu, not far from their other house in Beverly Hills. Ava has isolated herself after her husband's death. Susan is still in love with her strong, adoring daddy. The two women do not get along very well together. Enter Alex (Michael Nouri, the handsome leading man in the film ''Flashdance''), suave owner of the most exciting new restaurant in the area.

Alex is immediately taken with Ava, who jogs a lot and is writing an exercise book (''the best exercise for firming the thighs,'' she says into her tape recorder, ''is the forward lunge''). Ava, still recovering from the death of her husband, holds back. A puzzled Alex turns for comfort to Susan, who more than willingly jumps into bed with him. Somehow, he has no idea that she is Ava's daughter. When he learns the truth, he understandably begins drinking even more than befoe. Meanwhile, Ava is informing a pouty Susan that her father was no saint. ''I'm making him human,'' she explains in self-justification, ''he was not Zeus coming down from the mountain with a lightning bolt in each hand.'' In the end, Susan goes back to her young husband, and Ava goes to say goodbye to a still puzzled Alex. ''Thank you,'' she says, ''for setting me free.'' Nothing much has changed, really, but the viewer has had two hours of far-fetched titillation.

The networks will, if pressed, insist that their basic policies about program content have not changed dramatically because of competitive pressures. But the proof is, quite glaringly, in the product itself. Coming up on ABC sometime this season is a TV movie about incest, the ultimate taboo, starring Ted Danson of ''Cheers.'' I am told that it is handled with impeccable taste. The ''adult'' movement marches on.

Here is Tom Villard's Obituary from The New York Times

Tom Villard; Actor, 40

Published: November 17, 1994

Tom Villard, an actor with AIDS who continued to work in movies and television, died on Monday at a Los Angeles hospital. He was 40.

The cause was pneumonia, a publicity agent, Howard Bragman, said.

Mr. Villard, whose AIDS was diagnosed in 1992, went public with his illness this year. He was a native of Spencerport, N.Y., and had appeared in 12 feature films, including "Heartbreak Ridge" with Clint Eastwood in 1986 and "My Girl" in 1991. He had roles in several television shows this season, including episodes of "Frasier," "Sisters" and "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine." He also had the lead role in the 1980's NBC comedy "We Got It Made," the story of two big city bachelor roommates, their attractive maid and their suspicious girlfriends.

He is survived by his companion, Scott Chambliss, and his parents, Ron and Diane Villard.

For a Website dedicated to Teri Copley go to http://tericopley.org/

For more on We Got it Made go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Got_It_Made