Eight Is Enough

This family comedy, which initially would be that of a married couple with eight children, underwent several modifications from the beginning until it found the right direction. Diana Hyland would be the mother of the boys and wife of Dick Van Patten, but her sudden death from fatal cancer forced the writers to make changes to the script, at first Tom Bradford was alone until he met Abby (Betty Buckley) Tommy's tutor and was remarried. The second and third seasons of the series were the best, scripts that ranged from drama to comedy, the entire cast was great and the stories were generally very good. From season four the three eldest daughters become independent and rent their own apartment, from here the family clan is a little disarmed and the series turns more to drama than comedy, later new characters are added, the boyfriends and husbands of the older daughters. Like any series they had their maximum peak of creativity but after a little it was losing the charm of its best time.

Good show. My favorite characters were Tommy and Joanie. Dullest character was Elizabeth. Not many stories about her. Nicholas was cute until about the 4th season. By then he starts growing out of his cuteness. Everyone always complains about the Jeremy character in the 5th season. I thought he was a good addition although the ratings were totally down by the 5th season anyway. I never realized the father Tom had so many lines. Every time he speaks its usually a speech or something. Not complaining, just an observation. Most of the episodes were very entertaining although there are a few boring ones here and there. Overall I liked it a lot.

Eight is Enough was one of the best shows from the late 1970's and early 1980's. It was considered a dramedy. It had drama because the show could be serious at times but it also had comedy because the show was funny and it had a laugh track. Eight is Enough is now seen in reruns on CTS up here in Canada and I am happy about that. I had a major crush on Willie Aames (Tommy Bradford) when I was younger. Too bad there aren't many T.V. shows on now like this. Those were the good old days of television!

I remember very fondly the Friday evenings of the late 70s and early 80s, when I sat down in front of the TV set and watched "Eight Is Enough". (It was a glorious season: on Saturday evenings they used to broadcast "Charlie´s Angels" and, posteriorly, "The Love Boat"!). The Bradford family won my heart in so little time: they were sympathetic and cheerful and they loved one another -and, of course, they weren´t flawless, which gave them an additional appeal. All five girls in the show had something attractive to me: Mary (Lani O´Grady) was sort of an "ugly duckling" among her sisters and a tempestuous and bespectacled rebel, but pretty soon you could find that she had a tender heart; her temper appeased increasingly after a while and you could discover that she was really a very attractive woman; Joannie (Laurie Walters) was a funny "screwball" lady with a head full of crazy ideas and a special sensitivity; Susan (Susan Richardson) was a chubby red-head (too bad that she dyed her hair later!) whom love turned into a mature person very quickly; Nancy (Dianne Kay) was an ingenue-with-a-doll-face that could sometimes be a little tricky, and Elizabeth (Connie Needham) was a long-haired and petite but very well-built beauty who danced as if she were made of rubber. The boys too were nice: David (Grant Goodeve, who took over from Mark "Luke Skywalker" Hamill) was a somewhat insecure and independent character (the male reply to Mary) but he loved his family and was always ready to help; Tommy (Willie Aames) was a typical product of his age: the long-haired curly boy with the ambition of becoming a rock star and a special ability to make money in any kind of "business", but with all the heartaches and doubts that come from the fact of becoming an adult, and Nicholas (Adam Rich) was the kid who said the darndest things (what a source for his father´s articles!) and showed naïvety when he had to be naïve and was smart when he had to be smart. As for the adults, I must begin by saying that Diana Hyland´s death (and subsequently Joan´s) affected me when I learned of it; I have nothing against Abby or Betty Buckley, but I wonder: since only four or five episodes of the series had been made when Hyland died, couldn´t they have replaced her by another actress in the same character (as it has been done in many other TV series) instead of "killing" the mother so mysteriously? (We never get to know when, where or how she died.) Maybe the producers and writers of the show were tempted by the idea of how a young stepmother would fit into this big family and how she was initially rejected by some. Anyway, Hyland was a very attractive woman and she seemed a loving mother. And we get to Abby: she was charming, clever and understanding, and Buckley (don´t you find that she has a certain resemblance to Julie Andrews?) grabbed the character to perfection. (I was only annoyed by the fact that the "first name" she was known as was actually a diminutive of her late first husband´s surname; it´s a habit I loathe.) Dick Van Patten was simply a delight as Tom, the lovable, caring, generous and somewhat old-fashioned father of the brood. He really has the face of a good person and his phrases were usually gems. The recurring characters (Dr. Maxwell and his wife Daisy, Susan´s husband Merle [why did he sometimes call his father-in-law "Mr.B.", for God´s sake?], David´s wife Janet, Tom´s boss Eliot Randolph, Donna the secretary, Tommy´s friend Ernie, aunt Vivian, officer Bernstein, etc.) were also a treat to watch. Fortunately, a different TV channel made once a re-run of many of the episodes of the series (though, alas, not all of them) and I could record them on video. (I´m seeing them again at this time.) One of the few things I regret about the show is that Ralph Macchio didn´t have more time to develop his character of Abby´s orphaned, neglected and tormented nephew, Jeremy, and the family didn´t get to be so understanding to him as they were to one another. (Ironically, Macchio became a star a little bit later and the other boys and girls didn´t!). The series should have been lenghtier. Anyway, it´s a pity that programmes like this are no longer made on TV and are even subjected to quips from some young and not-so-young viewers and some new TV series. This makes me feel terribly nostalgic. Thank God it ever was Friday!

This show pretty much picks up where the "Brady Bunch" left off, but on a more serious tone. This show was definitely one of the first "dramadies", but it still managed to have its lighter moments. Most of them were provided by Willie Aames as the entrepreneur Tommy and Adam Rich as the cute Nicholas. These two young actors helped make this show one of the most loved of the 1970's. I do think that the major flaw in shows of this type though is the conflict of whether or not it was to be a serious drama or whether it was to be a cute domestic comedy along the lines of the aforementioned "Brady Bunch" and another show of that era "The Partridge Family".