Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries - Hope & Faith:Kelly Ripa, Faith Ford, and Ted McGinley

Hoe & Faith aired from September 2003 until June 2006 on ABC.

Two blond sisters caused chaos in the suburbs in this sunny, slapstick comedy.Faith ( Kelly Ripa) was the flighty one, who had gone to Hollywood and became a daytime soap opera star on The Sacred and the Sinful-until her character, Ashley Storm, was abruptly killed off. Her career on hold, she fled to Glen Falls, Ohio( near Columbus), where she moved in with her sensible sister Hope ( Faith Ford), in her big suburban home. Hope and her well-ordered family were not sure what to make of their celebrity relative, who seemed to cause constant uproar and was always "on," Big goofy dad Charley( Ted McGinley) was an orthodonest, Sydney ( Nicole Paggi and later Megan Fox) the self -absorbed teen, Haley ( Macey Cruthird) the curly-haired, wisecracking, middle kid and Justin ( Paulie Litt) the put-upon youngest, who had to give up his room fror Aunt Faith. The kids really liked their cool aunt.

Despite their different styles Hope and Faith had many misadventures, including food fights, run-ins with the staid locals and various part-time jobs. For a time they ran their own catering business. In 2005 Faith received a marriage proposal from handsome newsman Larry Walker ( Dean Cain), and another from even handsomer former baseball player Gary " The Gooch" Gucharez ( Mark Consuelos). Others showing up occasionally included the gals randy dad Jack Fairfield ( Robert Wagner), their mom, (Jack's ex) Mary Jo ( Cheryl Ladd), Jack's girlfriends Summer ,Anne and Mandi ( Lynda Carter, Jacklyn Smith Jenny McCarthy), car dealer " Handsome Hal" Halverson ( Regis Philbin) and Faith's therapist Dr. Nancy Lombard( Susan Sullivan).

A Review of Miss Match and Hope & Faith from The New York Times

TELEVISION REVIEW; Matches Unmade, Then Made Again
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Published: September 26, 2003

Real joy pervades ''Miss Match,'' a romantic comedy that has its premiere tonight on NBC. Not only does Alicia Silverstone reprise the pose of beleaguered noblesse oblige that she struck so gleefully in ''Clueless'' -- getting lost in fluff, losing sight of her own desires -- but she also performs in a delightful context, with lovelorn characters who are both as wonderfully small-minded and as doggedly expectant as real single people.

Kate Fox (Ms. Silverstone) is a divorce lawyer in her father's Los Angeles law firm; she also moonlights as a professional matchmaker. This revolving-door conceit, which provides a steady stream of people with their minds on matrimony, is so cutely wrought as to recall ''The Love Boat.'' Within this realm hope cannot but triumph (and triumph and triumph) over experience. Sure enough, Kate sunders old romances only to orchestrate new ones. Knowing she's lucky -- lucky in the way of a child whose father's rich and whose mom is good-looking -- she determines to use that luck to make other people happy.

So where's the story? First, it's in the details: the idiosyncratic and gestural comedy of couples' getting together or coming apart. Even the pass-through characters on ''Miss Match'' -- from Kate's mother, a torch singer, to her undermining high-school friend -- are written with great nuance. One first date that Kate has arranged goes awry because it turns out the woman, without announcing anything, has planned it on her birthday, and that's just weird. At another time, when a skillful chiropractor shows up to court Kate, he reveals that he resents M.D.'s (of course!) -- and, fairly or not, that's enough to make him the wrong guy.

But Kate knows how to recover. With a distractible and philandering father (played with a glint by Ryan O'Neal), Kate understands desertion. Superintending the romances of others, she experiences something like the loneliness of the executive producer -- a feeling Darren Star, who helped create ''Miss Match'' (and created ''Sex and the City''), may know something about. Like Emma in ''Emma'' and Cher in ''Clueless,'' Kate makes matches to control -- even dominate -- her social world, a realm of conventions that threatens to turn her from a carefree girl to a beholden wife. She longs for love, but she fears, above all, losing her free-floating sense of romance to the obligations of marriage -- with its prenups, its betrayals and its many irreconcilabilities.

So here's hoping that Kate staves off marriage as long as possible. And that Ms. Silverstone and Mr. Star enjoy a long and happy collaboration.

Other blondes who make debuts tonight have neither Kate's joy nor her intriguing troubles; instead, Faith and Hope on ABC's ''Hope and Faith'' have lines apparently written by a sitcom computer. Faith (Kelly Ripa) has just lost a part on a soap opera; she comes to stay with Hope (Faith Ford), her husband, Charley (Ted McGinley), and their three children. Jokes touch on artificial breasts, food fights, women's concerns about their weight, and how little time Hope and Charley can find to have sex.

Ms. Ripa has a dippy but real charm, and her tan-to-blond shade ratio is impressive, but this show is not clever enough for her. Faith is a cutout, a dizzy daytime star who says ''incontinent'' when she means ''incompetent.'' Hope, as the prudish one, is no better. Expect her to purse her lips, get rattled and condemn pizza because it's not nutritious. And then switch the television off, fire up your TiVo and savor ''Miss Match'' again.

A Review from Entertainment Weekly

TV Review
Hope & Faith
B By Ken Tucker

Loud, obvious, and crass, Hope & Faith'' is one of this season's more fascinating new sitcoms. It takes two familiar faces -- Kelly Ripa, the soap opera star who unsettles Regis Philbin with her quick-wittedness far more than Kathie Lee Gifford ever did with her grating mawkishness, and Faith Ford, the ''Murphy Brown'' veteran who seemed doomed to be known only as a ''Murphy Brown'' veteran -- and makes them entirely plausible sisters. Well, ''plausible'' in the sitcom sense: They both have heart-shaped faces surmounted by teased, (enhanced) blond, and poufed-up hair. In close-ups, we see that these actresses also share attractive age lines (I don't intend sarcasm or sexism here; a well-placed wrinkle is alluring). In full-length shots, their slim, toned frames approach genetic matchups. When they screech -- which is what these latter-day Laverne and Shirleys do a lot of, to wrench laughs from meager punchlines -- even their vocal timbres are similar.

All of which wouldn't matter if the show's premise didn't work, but it does. Hope (Ford) is a married-with-three-kids Ohio housewife; Faith (Ripa) is a single actress recently fired from her soap opera role who seeks comfort from this Tinseltown humiliation by moving in with her suburban sis. Sure, the idea is bunk -- no daytime-Emmy-winning actress (''I should have won two: I played twins!'') is going to slink back home to the Midwest, right? -- but the writers suggest that Faith has squandered her 10-year TV plunder. Given what an impulsive, madcap gal she is, why not go along for that narrative ride -- especially since the setup enables Ripa's Faith to move in. Clad in minidresses and white go-go boots (thanks to ''Sex and the City'' costumer Patricia Field), she becomes a liberating force field of energy for a dowdy family tightly controlled by her self-described ''uptight fuddy-duddy'' sister. The clan also includes familiar TV face Ted McGinley (hired after the scrapped pilot was shot), who is completely convincing as easygoing hubby Charley. Luckily, his character seems to enjoy Hope's sensible companionship (and her slacks and flats) -- a crucial element, since if it looked for an instant as though Charley preferred the hotsy Hollywood Faith, the show would disintegrate immediately into EWWW ickiness.

Indeed, despite numerous sitcom-standard sex jokes (Faith, on her youthful experience competing on ''Star Search'': ''That Ed McMahon sure is handsy''), there is a fundamental air of innocence that enables ''Hope & Faith'' to get away with such tired setups as the sisters being wacky at an open-coffin funeral or hiding a nearly undressed young man from Charley in a living-room cabinet. (The studly punk, you see, was invited over by Faith for the benefit of eldest daughter Sydney, played by Nicole Paggi, but he thinks he's there for a nooner with the soap diva. Ah, youth!)

There's a lot of slapstick in ''H&F'' -- the pilot culminated in a pretty hilarious, sisterly food fight -- and as I've suggested, no plotline that hasn't been done by ''The Patty Duke Show.'' But there's pleasure to be taken in seeing these familiar tropes executed with bright-eyed energy, which both Ford, and especially Ripa, possess in abundance. Ripa, an alum of ''All My Children,'' is playing, of course, a heightened -- or maybe the better word is ''compressed'' -- version of herself, a more brittle, desperate variation on the chatty persona she presents each morning on ''Live With Regis and Kelly.'' (Philbin's previous cohost never could have pulled this off -- as Kathie Lee proved in her grotesque 2001 TV-movie stab at self-parody, ''Spinning Out of Control.'') The framework of ''Hope & Faith'' is assiduously standard; each episode even tends to end with silly Faith learning a little life lesson (e.g., she should act her age -- a begrudged 33 -- because she is, after all, ''another parent'' to the kids in the household). But the show is funny anyway, due to Ripa and Ford's go-for-broke foolishness, which is a subtext for the way both actresses desperately want to worm their way into fresh prime-time stardom.

An Article from Entertainment Weekly
Published on October 17, 2003

Ted McGinley Is Not A Killer
Forget what you've heard, Kelly Ripa's HOPE & FAITH costar just might be TV's greatest good-luck charm
By Jason Adams

Actor Ted McGinley has a killer reputation. For more than 20 years, he's been a featured player on some of TV's most popular series, from The Love Boat to Married...With Children. Usually brought in relatively late in a show's life, McGinley has come to be seen by some as a sort of prime-time grim reaper: If McGinley's mug appears on screen, a show's deathwatch has officially begun.

''Anytime I talk about Ted, I tell people first of all I think he's a good actor,'' says Jon Hein, who's operated jumptheshark.com since 1997. The site is named after the infamous 1977 episode of Happy Days in which Fonzie strapped on water skis and jumped a shark tank, a moment that has come to symbolize the desperation that hit shows exhibit when they finally run out of ideas. Jumptheshark.com is dedicated to chronicling such notorious television milestones, and Ted McGinley is the site's patron saint. Says Hein: ''When he signs on, the show is going to jump the shark, and there's just countless examples of it.''

The site points to McGinley's roles on such canceled shows as Dynasty, Sports Night, and last year's Charlie Lawrence, in which he starred opposite Nathan Lane. (Oh, and by the way, it also notes his star turns as frat guy Stan Gable in such films as Revenge of the Nerds I, III, and IV.) Yet not all of McGinley's shows have wilted upon his arrival.

''Look, it took me three and a half years to kill The Love Boat, four and a half years to kill Happy Days, seven and a half years to kill Married...With Children,'' McGinley said recently while promoting his new show, ABC's Faith Ford-Kelly Ripa sitcom, Hope & Faith. ''So I'm hoping it takes me 10 years to kill this one.''

So how come McGinley gets singled out as the ultimate show killer when there are threats like Alison La Placa and Scott Baio still wandering onto studio sets? ''Everyone's looking to take a potshot,'' says McGinley, pointing not just to Hein's jumptheshark.com but to other sites as well. (On AmIAnnoying.com, 57.64 percent of respondents find Ted McGinley annoying!) ''I've got big shoulders, I don't care. I love my wife, I love my kids. Go ahead, bring it on. I don't know why, but I'm an easy target. And I don't do anything to dispel it.''

As of now, it hardly seems to matter. About 11 million viewers tuned in to each of the first two episodes of Hope & Faith, in which McGinley plays Charley, a wisecracking-but-loving orthodontist father of three and the husband of Faith Ford's stay-at-home mom, Hope. The show gave ABC its largest audience on an opening Friday night since 1996's Sabrina, the Teenage Witch -- and the highest for any network since CSI first showed itself on CBS three years ago. A successful run would go a long way to proving what McGinley's costars past and present already know: He is not a show killer.

''I think any man that's as good-looking as he is has to take their amount of crap,'' says Ripa, who on Hope & Faith plays McGinley's annoying sister-in-law, a failed soap star who's come to live with him and his family in their Ohio home. ''If I was him, I wouldn't change a thing, because it works.''

It's probably not surprising that the patron saint of shark jumping spent much of his youth at the beach. Born in Orange County, Calif. (he now lives in L.A. with his wife, actress Gigi Rice, and his two sons), McGinley, 45, was a surfer and a lifeguard. While attending USC, McGinley gave modeling a shot, and one of his gigs wound up costing him his water-polo scholarship: The university concluded the money he'd earned appearing in sporting-goods ads constituted an ''endorsement'' that violated NCAA regulations. McGinley decided to dry off and go with modeling full-time. After moving to New York City, he landed an assortment of ads (his sunny face graced boxes of Sun-In hair lightener, alongside a young Sharon Stone) before he was discovered by director Garry Marshall, who cast him in Happy Days in 1980 and also gave him his big-screen start in 1982's Young Doctors in Love.

Hope's Ford expresses complete confidence in her new costar. ''Kelly and I just sort of looked at each other when they said the thing about jump the shark and we were like, What?'' says Ford. ''I said, 'That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard!' You have to laugh at it.''

And at least one former colleague suggests that, far from being a show killer, McGinley may in fact have precisely the opposite effect. ''I don't know about his previous experiences, but on our show he was around for a long time,'' says David Faustino, who played Bundy son Bud on Children. ''You can't really consider that a show killer. Maybe for us he was actually a good-luck charm.''

A sentiment Ripa seconds. ''If I had 10 shows, I'd make sure he was on all 10 of them,'' she says. ''His record is so good -- I mean look at all the shows he's been on, they've all been hits. He's been associated with every hit. And he's been on the shows for years. So, I mean, if he's a show killer, put him on my show, please, my God!''

Marion Ross, who played Happy Days matriarch Marion Cunningham, costarred with McGinley during his first three seasons on TV, and Mrs. C has her own take on the McGinley mystique: ''In order to really get ahead in this world, you've got to have a little bit of a killer in you.''

And by the way, if you wonder how long ''H&F'' can stretch out the ex-soap-star-in-a-small-town idea, I'm sure I'm not giving the writing staff ideas when I suggest the obvious: Along about the year the series is limping its way toward the gold mine that is syndication, it'll be time for Ripa's Faith to find a cranky local guy and start cohosting ''Good Morning, Ohio,'' don'tcha think?

An article on Megan Fox replacing Nicole Paggi
Published on July 19, 2004

Faith Ford Gets New Daughter on 'Hope'

Faith Ford is getting a new daughter on her ABC sitcom "Hope and Faith."

Megan Fox will replace Nicole Paggi who in the first season played Hope's (Ford) oldest child, Sydney, a 16-year-old beauty who rebels at her mother's authority but idolizes her Aunt Faith (Kelly Ripa).

While rare, it is not unprecedented for kids' roles on family sitcoms to be recast during the series' run. Shows that have gone through such casting changes include ABC's "My Wife & Kids" and "Roseanne."

Fox, whose credits include the feature "Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen" and the WB Network's comedy series "The Help," will next be seen in the ABC Family original movie "Crimes of Fashion" starring Kaley Cuoco.

An Interview with Megan Fox from TV Guide
Published on November 19, 2005

Confessions of Hope & Faith's Teenage Fox
by Matt Webb Mitovich

When ABC wanted someone "sassier and edgier" (as series creator Joanna Johnson once put it) to play the tarty teen daughter, Sydney, on Hope & Faith (Fridays at 9 pm/ET), they recast the role prior to the fall 2004 season with Megan Fox, whose credits at the time included Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (with Lindsay Lohan) and an Olsen twins movie. Well, edgy is what they got. Although Fox's recent lad-mag pictorial (and its equally buzzworthy quotes about her beau, Freddie's Brian Austin Green) was deemed off-limits ,TVGuide.com agreed to interview the ingenue about her family-friendly TV gig.

TVGuide.com: You've worked with the Olsens and Lindsay Lohan. Really hanging out with the party girls, aren't you?
Megan Fox: Yeah, but we were all a lot younger then, so there really wasn't any partying going on.

TVGuide.com: I imagine it's difficult to be a young and attractive actress living under the scrutiny of today's media and pervasive paparazzi.
Fox: Where I am right now with my career, I don't feel that, but I'm sure girls like Lindsay do. I'm actually kind of glad that I'm not under that kind of scrutiny, because [the tabloids] can give you the feeling of being so exposed to people whom you don't even know. So right now where I am, I'm fine. I'm out of all of that. I still have my private life and no one really bothers me or knows who I am! [Laughs]

TVGuide.com: Sometimes I almost feel bad for Lindsay. Please tell her I said that.
Fox: [Laughs] OK!

TVGuide.com: Years ago, would you ever have imagined you'd be a part of family-friendly ABC fare?
Fox: No, I would not have. I went into the audition not expecting anything. I knew it shot in New York, so I was like, "Oh, I'm not going to do that, I don't want to move, blah-blah-blah...." But it all went very fast and they cast me and the next thing I knew I was living out here. I always thought I'd be doing indie films and things like that.

TVGuide.com: Did you ever meet Nicole Paggi, the girl you replaced as Sydney?
Fox: Yeah, just recently. I was in L.A. at Whiskey Bar with my boyfriend, and I was in the bathroom and she was standing at the mirror doing her lipstick. We both just sort of stared at each other for what seemed like 10 minutes... and then we started laughing hysterically.

TVGuide.com: So the fur didn't fly?
Fox: Oh, no. I had been terrified to run into her, figuring she would hate me, but we started talking and she was really great.

TVGuide.com: Sydney is always trying to pull one over on her parents. What's one of the worst lies you've told in real life?
Fox: Oh, god... um...

TVGuide.com: Look at you, having trouble choosing....
Fox: Yeah, because when I was like 14 or 15, 16 even, I was always sneaking out of the house and ditching school to go to the beach and surf, things like that. So I can't give you one specific answer, but it has something to do with saying I'm home and in bed when I really wasn't.

TVGuide.com: What did you do, slip out the bedroom window and shimmy down the trellis?
Fox: Well, I lived on the second story, so I had this whole scheme where I would call my friends or my boyfriend, whoever was going to break me out and....

TVGuide.com: They'd pull up with a laundry truck?
Fox: No, one of those trucks from Arrested Development with the airplane stairs. [Laughs] Actually, I would leave our ladder from the garage out on the side of the house, and then go up to my room. My friends would pull up with the car lights off, in neutral, and they'd set up the ladder for me to climb down. But one time my mom figured out I wasn't there and put the ladder back in the garage, so I had to ring the doorbell.

TVGuide.com: A ladder is tremendously subtle.
Fox: Yeah, thank you!

TVGuide.com: What have you learned from your TV aunt and mom, Kelly Ripa and Faith Ford? Personally or professionally. Actually, knowing Kelly, I may be afraid to hear what she has taught you!
Fox: Yeah, I'm going to keep most of it private! But they have taught me how important punctuality is, and how you have to keep your reputation as professional as possible, even though, like.... No, I can't say that. Never mind. I'm just going to stick with what I said! Oh, and with all of my relationships being long-distance, Kelly has taught me to deal with that, to think of being here in New York as being "in college" or something like that so I can make it through. Because it's kind of tough sometimes.

TVGuide.com: What else have you got going on?
Fox: With my career?

TVGuide.com: Yes, definitely with your career. [To publicist on phone call] Did you hear that, publicist? With her career.
Publicist: Thank you!
Fox: [Laughs] No, I'm just busy with the show, but I'm hoping to get into some films over the hiatus.

TVGuide.com: Let's finish up with you telling me about your famous shoe collection.
Fox: [Dreamily] Ohhh, my shoes... it's not going to sound that amazing but I have upwards of, I would guess, 30 to 50 pairs of dress shoes, but they're all really amazing. I love Jimmy Choo, and Casadei, and Cavalli.... I've got like 15 pairs at my boyfriend's house, and they're all over the floor, and they're all over the floor at my apartment here and my apartment in L.A. They're all over the place!

TVGuide.com: Have you reached that level of fame yet where designers are gifting you pairs?
Fox: No, I have not, but I eagerly await that. [Laughs]

TVGuide.com: Can you shed light for me on why women spend so much on fancy shoes and then whine about them being uncomfortable to wear?
Fox: I actually don't do that. You have to expect that they're not going to feel great on your feet. If you're going to pay that much money for them, you can't complain!

For a Website dedicated to Kelly Ripa go to http://kellyripafan.fanlounge.org/

For Faith Ford's Official Website go to http://www.faithford.tv/

For a Website dedicated to Faith Ford go to http://www.faithford.com

For a Website dedicated to Megan Fox go to http://www.megan-fox.net/

For another Megan Fox Website go to http://www.megansafox.com/

For another Review of Hope & Faith go to http://www.commonsensemedia.org/tv-reviews/Hope-Faith.html