Development
After Kirchenbauer's portrayal of Coach Lubbock became popular on Growing Pains by the spring of 1987, ABC executives saw that the opportunity was ripe to commission a spin-off with his character. Kirchenbauer quickly accepted ABC's offer to star in his own series, and Dan Guntzelman, Mike Sullivan and Steve Marshall also agreed that a series further exploring the life of Coach Lubbock would have appeal.
The producers shot a half-hour test pilot for ABC in the fall of 1987 entitled Yo, Coach. It was set at Thomas E. Dewey High, the same high school that Mike and Carol Seaver attended on Growing Pains, and further explored the Coach's life both at Dewey and at home. This original, rough concept saw the Coach with a wife, played by Pamela Brull, but with no evident children. Kenneth Tigar also co-starred as the principal of Dewey High. The centerpiece of the early premise was Graham's relationship with his students, and how he helped them move through life's various obstacles. ABC praised the pilot when it was screened, and scheduled the Growing Pains spin-off for the following spring.
Major changes, like those that usually occur in the pilot phase, inevitably took place. ABC saw Kirchenbauer's new series as one with lots of family appeal, and insisted that Graham Lubbock be given children of his own. The role of Graham's wife was also recast with Deborah Harmon, and the show's setting ended up being moved from Dewey High and Long Island altogether. Gunztelman, Sullivan and Marshall eventually decided to add a rather large family to the cast, and this set up a story for a Growing Pains crossover episode that was sure to touch prospective viewers of the new series emotionally. Casting was completed for the new series in early 1988, and to indicate the large brood that Graham Lubbock presided over, the title was by now settled as Just the Ten of Us. The principal cast was introduced in the two-part Growing Pains crossover episode "How the West Was Won" (aired on April 20th and 26th, 1988), in which Graham learns that his job at Dewey High will be cut. As a part of their investigation, Mike Seaver and his friends discover Graham, his wife Elizabeth, and their seven children living in a severely cramped downtown apartment. The second part of this Growing Pains episode, in which the Lubbocks make their move to California, aired as the lead in to the premiere episode of Just the Ten of Us on April 26, 1988.
Read more about this topic: Just The Ten Of Us
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“The young women, what can they not learn, what can they not achieve, with Columbia University annex thrown open to them? In this great outlook for women’s broader intellectual development I see the great sunburst of the future.”
—M. E. W. Sherwood (1826–1903)
“Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp.... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.”
—Arthur Miller (b. 1915)