Good Times - Departures of John Amos and Esther Rolle

Departures of John Amos and Esther Rolle

Husband-and-wife team Austin and Irma Kalish were hired to oversee the day-to-day running of the show, replacing Allan Manings, who had become executive producer when he was also working on another Lear sitcom, One Day at a Time. The Kalishes and Manings, as script supervisors, threw ideas to writers Roger Shulman, John Baskin, and Bob Peete, and eventually penned an exit for Amos's character.

At the beginning of the 1976–77 season in the episode "The Big Move", the family was packing to move from the ghetto to a better life in Mississippi where James had found a job as a partner in a garage. At the end of the first episode that season, Florida learned via a telegram (which, at first, she thought was to congratulate her on her move) that James was killed in a car accident. It was the following episode in which, after spending most of the episode refusing to acknowledge and fully mourn James' death, she smashed a glass bowl on the floor and uttered her famous line: "Damn, damn, DAMN!". The show continued without a father, which was something Rolle did not want to pursue. One of the primary appeals of the project for her had been the presentation it initially offered of the strong black father leading his family. However, she stayed on hoping that the loss of the father's character would necessitate a shift in J.J.'s character, as J.J. would now become the man of the family. The writers did not take this approach; if anything, J.J.'s foolishness increased. Wanting no further part in such depictions, by the summer of 1977, Rolle left the series. She was written out as marrying and moving to Arizona with her new love interest, Carl Dixon (Moses Gunn).

Despite this, Good Times still performed well in the Nielsen ratings, ranking at number 26 for the 1976–77 season, making its fourth year breaking the top-30 rated programs.