Webster (TV Series) - Production History

Production History

When Alex Karras and Susan Clark married in real life, they started their own production company, Georgian Bay Ltd. ABC approached the couple about a sitcom development deal which resulted in a proposed romantic-comedy series, Another Ballgame, to star Karras as an ex-NFL player who quickly found true love with a socialite consumer advocate (Clark) on a cruise. ABC picked it up for the fall 1983 schedule, with Paramount Television as packager, but major changes would occur before the premiere.

After seeing Emmanuel Lewis in a Burger King commercial, ABC's programming chief, Lew Erlicht, wanted to give the actor his own series. At this time, Another Ballgame creator Stu Silver desired to develop an original show based on the lead characters portrayed by Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in the film Woman of the Year and saw Alex Karras and Susan Clark's on-screen chemistry as being strikingly reminiscent of this.

The network felt the need to cast Lewis in a project quickly, before he grew another inch (like child actor Gary Coleman, who was also small for his age, Lewis would end up at 4'3".) With the number of comedy pilots ABC had greenlit for that fall's schedule, it was likely that Lewis would not be able to get his own series and timeslot unless he was worked into already-existing comedy projects. So, among others shows, co-producers on Another Ballgame were approached about working Lewis into the show. Stars Karras and Clark liked the idea of the sudden marriage and instant adoption of a young black boy, and the Webster character was thus created.

The premise of Webster's parents' death, and his inclusion into the Papadopolis household, originated with the second phase of the pilot, which had the show's title changed to Then Came You. Executives soon made it inherently clear that the show's major focus would be on the Webster character, instead of it being a split romantic/family comedy. The character of George Papadopolis' buddy and broadcasting colleague, played by Art LaFleur, was summarily dropped from the regular cast; once getting to air, LaFleur only appeared in the pilot. Karras and Clark did not approve this round of changes, as creative control was still in their hands with Georgian Bay. However, Clark originally prevented their co-producers and ABC from changing the series' title to Webster, since she wanted to maintain the ensemble aspect of the series. While early promotions for the sitcom carried the title Then Came You, network politics would end up violating Clark's request; the brass ultimately settled on Webster just before its fall premiere.

Webster premiered in September 1983 and was an instant hit. From the start, the final product was drawing close comparisons to NBC's popular Diff'rent Strokes, which featured the diminutive Gary Coleman as a young black boy adopted by a white family. The main differences, however, were that Lewis' character of Webster Long had an adoptive mother and father from the start who had no children, whereas Coleman's character Arnold Jackson was adopted by a widower with a daughter. Also, Coleman's short stature was due to a congenital kidney condition, whereas Lewis was completely healthy and had no pre-existing condition to explain his height. Eventually, in the fall of 1985, Webster would be joined on ABC's Friday night lineup by Diff'rent Strokes, when the latter moved to ABC for what turned out to be its eighth and final season.

Despite the early success, the show that made it to the air as Webster was not what Karras and Clark foresaw as their ideal starring vehicle. The first season was fraught with tension, between the couple's disagreements and their protests with Paramount and ABC. After the initial episodes that set up the show's premise (George and Katherine's wedding, Webster's arrival, and the resulting adjustments) were shot, most of the plots became exclusively Webster-driven, even though it was the writers' intention to include story elements that focused on George and Katherine as much as possible. The show's married stars did win many of the early script disputes, and several first season episodes did get to focus on the new marriage and lives of the adult leads. The in-fighting on set continued, and especially had an effect on Emmanuel Lewis. Reportedly, Lewis was often whisked away from the set whenever Karras and Clark argued and demanded rewrites. It became so severe that Lewis blamed the trouble on himself.

After the first season ended, ABC stopped pushing hard for "all Webster, all the time"; Paramount eventually came to an agreement with Karras and Clark that they would continue to get prominent storylines for their characters. In the long run, the series did become part romantic and part family-oriented, as Clark and Karras wanted it to be; the series was also regarded for handling Webster's childhood stories in a more sophiscated, intelligent fashion than other comedies of the time that relied on preachy, heavy-handed morals to tell a story. The only condition that Paramount laid out for Clark and Karras was that Emmanuel Lewis, who ABC saw as a money maker above all else, would get production credit alongside them. As a result, "Emmanuel Lewis Entertainment Enterprises, Inc." was launched in 1986, acting as another production company for Webster starting in its fourth season.

By season three at the latest, the stormy relations of the first season disappeared on set. The main cast bonded well from then on, with Karras becoming a surrogate father figure to Lewis. Webster director Joel Zwick, in his interview for the 2003 E! True Hollywood Story on Emmanuel Lewis, remarked that, "As far as TV sitcom families go, it took them longer than most to acclimate to each other."