The best Suzanne Somers movies and TV shows
On October 15, 2023, a day before her 77th birthday, fans were heartbroken to learn about this film and television personality Suzanne Somers had died after a several-year battle with breast cancer. Here we take a look back at a career spanning five decades and some of the best-received projects in her catalog of work.
American graffiti
Four years before everyone was watching war of stars and three years after no one saw it THX-1138, It was directed by a young George Lucas American graffiti, a feel-good, nostalgic look back at the early ’60s that’s a must-see if you’ve taken a film course at a community college. The film, showered with Oscar nominations, is a perennial favorite of the American Film Institute and holds a special place in cinema history.
Somers’ contributions to American graffiti weren’t earth-shattering. Her character is referred to as the “Blonde in T-Bird,” so she didn’t exactly blow up the 1962 Americana Death Star. Still, the film had a profound influence on cinema, and The Blonde in the T-Bird had a profound influence on Richard Dreyfus’ Curt. The role had an equal impact on Somers herself, who dubbed it the “one-woman show” in 2005 The blonde in the Thunderbird.
Three’s Company
Do you know how times, tastes and sensibilities change over time? Three’s Companythe American adaptation of the British sitcom man about the house, was, at its core, a series about a man who pretended to be gay so that his landlord would let him live with two women. By today’s standards it’s a hard sell.
When it premiered in 1977, it was also one of the biggest, most successful and most popular sitcoms of its time, turning its stars into celebrities almost overnight. It was impossible for Somers to part with the character of Chrissy Snow, a role she landed the day before filming the show’s pilot episode.
The fame Somers amassed in her time Three’s Company was only surpassed by her infamous exit from the series after the fifth season. After her demands for a 500 percent raise were not met, she suffered a drastic decline in her screen time and was then fired.
step by step
It was in the 1990s and ABC’s block of TGIF Programming was the best place to pull up a hyper-colored bean bag and sip a Surge Cola on a Friday night. In an area home to a thousand predominantly white TV families, few shows offered the same density of cable-knit sweaters as Step by step.
premiere in 1991, step by step lasted 160 episodes and told the story of two single parents who merged their families into a cohesive unit. The mother, Carol Foster, was played by Somers for six seasons on ABC and a seventh when the series moved to CBS.
Serial mom
John Waters’ films fall broadly into two categories: those you can watch on a date after seeing someone for a few months, and those you can’t watch on a date or at all. Serial mom is part of the first group – a cheesy, bizarre piece of Burton-esque violence and depravity, a posthumous divine cameo that isn’t as strange as it could have been. At this point in her career, Suzanne Somers was probably best known for her numerous television films or for being Suzanne Somers. It only makes sense, then, that she plays herself in the film, which was recently cast as a TV movie version of the story’s main character. Waters, you rascal.
The Suzanne Show
In 2012, Somers made the leap into daytime television, hosting a talk show named after herself: The Suzanne Show. The series lasted only a year, and it did not garner widespread acclaim – Somers’ heated views on health and medical issues were singled out as particularly problematic – but it did earn its host a Daytime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Host in a Lifestyle a /travel program”, and that’s not nothing.
