About Opentopia
Opentopia Directory Encyclopedia Tools

Good Times

Encyclopedia : G : GO : GOO : Good Times

This article is about the 1970s television show. For other uses of Good Times, see Good Times (disambiguation)
Good Times was an American sitcom that was originally broadcast from February 1, 1974 until August 1, 1979 on the CBS television network. The program was a spin-off of the sitcom Maude (itself a spin-off of All in the Family). Like those two other series, Good Times was developed by producer Norman Lear.

Contents

Synopsis

[Spoiler warningSpoiler warning]: Plot and/or ending details follow.
The character Florida Evans (played by Esther Rolle) had been Maude Findlay's housekeeper on Maude. In early 1974, the Florida Evans character and her husband James (referred to as "Henry Evans" on Maude) were transported to an apartment in a housing project (implicitly the infamous Cabrini-Green projects, shown in the opening and closing credits but never mentioned by name on the show) in a poor, African American neighborhood in inner-city Chicago.

Florida Evans lived with her husband James (John Amos) and their three children J.J. (Jimmie Walker), Thelma (Bern Nadette Stanis), and Michael (Ralph Carter). When the series began, J.J. and Thelma were seventeen and sixteen years old, respectively, and Michael, called "the militant midget" by his father due to his passionate activism, was eleven years old. Their exuberant neighbor, and Florida's best friend, was Willona Woods (played by Ja'net Du Bois), a recent divorcée.

Topical situations

As was the case on other Norman Lear sitcoms, the characters and subject matter in Good Times were a breakthrough for American television. Working class characters had certainly been featured in sitcoms before (dating back at least to The Honeymooners), but never before had a weekly series featured African American characters living in such impoverished conditions. (Fred and Lamont Sanford of Sanford and Son, though they lived in the poor area of Watts, at least had their own home and business.) Episodes of Good Times dealt with the characters' attempts to get by in an inner-city ghetto despite all the odds stacked against them. When he wasn't unemployed, James Evans usually worked at least two jobs, many of them temporary such as a dish washer or car washer, as he struggled to provide for his family. Being a sitcom, however, the episodes were usually more uplifting and positive than they were depressing, as the Evans family stuck together and persevered.

Initial success

Originally, the program was slated to run in the spring of 1974, but high ratings led CBS to renew the program for the 1974–1975 season. The program was very successful during its first full season on the air, 1974–1975, when it was the seventh-highest-rated program in the Nielsen ratings and a quarter of the American television-viewing public tuned in to an episode during any given week. During 1974–1975, three of the top ten highest-rated programs on American TV centered around the lives of African-Americans: Sanford and Son, The Jeffersons, and Good Times.

Backstage tension

Almost from the premiere episode, J.J., an aspiring artist, was the public's favorite character on the show and his frequently-invoked catch phrase "dy-no-mite" became very popular. As the series progressed through its second and third year, however, Rolle and Amos, who played the Evans parents, grew more disillusioned with the direction the show was taking as J.J.'s antics and stereotypically buffoonish behavior took precedence in the storylines. Rolle was rather vocal about disliking the character of J.J. in a 1975 interview with Ebony magazine.

He's eighteen and he doesn't work. He can't read or write. He doesn't think. The show didn't start out to be that...Little by little—with the help of the artist, I suppose, because they couldn't do that to me—they have made J.J. more stupid and enlarged the role. Negative images have been slipped in on us through the character of the oldest child.

— Esther Rolle [#endnote_Rolle]
Although doing so less publicly, Amos also was outspoken about his dissatisfaction with J.J.'s character. The ill feelings came to a head when it came time to negotiate Amos' contract in the summer of 1976, and he was dismissed from the series.

The writers would prefer to put a chicken hat on J.J. and have him prance around saying "DY-NO-MITE", and that way they could waste a few minutes and not have to write meaningful dialogue.

— John Amos [#endnote_Amos]

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 at a time 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 1976–1977 season, 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. 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 heading 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, however; if anything, J.J.'s foolishness only 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).

Rolle had disliked the Carl Dixon character, as she believed Florida would have not moved on so quickly after James' death. Rolle also thought the writers had disregarded Florida's devout Christian beliefs by making her fall for Carl, who was an atheist. When Rolle eventually agreed to return to the show, one of the conditions on which she insisted was that the Carl Dixon character be written out as if he never existed. Thus, the Carl Dixon character became an example of Chuck Cunningham syndrome.

Good Times without the parents

With Amos and Rolle gone, Ja'net Du Bois took over as the star, checking on the Evans children as they were now living alone. New characters were added or had their roles expanded: Johnny Brown as the overweight building superintendent Nathan Bookman; Ben Powers as Thelma's husband Keith Anderson; and Janet Jackson as Penny Gordon Woods, an abused girl adopted by Willona.

It was at this time that many viewers defected from the series, and although Florida returned (the writers had finally been forced to let J.J.'s character mature to a point which Rolle found tolerable) for the sixth season in 1978, the viewers did not, and production was halted abruptly in early 1979.

The last original episode of Good Times aired in the summer of 1979. In a series finale typical of the series, each character had a "happy ending." J.J. finally got his big break as an artist for a comic book company, after years of the audience waiting for such a development. J.J.'s newly-created character, DynoWoman was based on Thelma herself. Michael attended college and moved into an on-campus dorm. Keith's bad knee miraculously healed, leading to the Chicago Bears offering him a contract to play football. Keith and (a newly pregnant) Thelma moved to a luxury apartment across town and offered Florida the chance to move in with them. Willona became the head buyer of the boutique she worked in and she and Penny move in to the same building and become their downstairs neighbors (again).

Two-parters

Good Times, like many other Norman Lear series, was known for its use of the "two-parter" to draw viewers back to the show the next week. Although these story arcs usually played out over two episodes, some stories, like Willona adopting Penny from her abusive mother, took as many as four episodes to play out.

Here is a list of notable Good Times two-parters:

Production

The first two seasons of Good Times were taped at CBS Television City in Hollywood, California. The show moved to Metromedia Square, Norman Lear's own production facility, in the fall of 1975.

Principal cast

DVD Releases

Season Releases
DVD Name Release Date Additional Information
The Complete First Season February 4 2003 Includes all 13 episodes from Season 1.
The Complete Second Season February 3 2004 Inlcudes all 24 episodes from Season 2
The Complete Third Season August 10 2004 Includes all 24 episodes from Season 3.
The Complete Fourth Season February 15 2005 Includes all 23 episodes from Season 4.
The Complete Fifth Season August 23 2005 Includes all 24 episodes from Season 5.
The Complete Sixth Season August 1 2006 Includes all 23 episodes from Season 6.

The first five seasons of Good Times are available on Region 1 DVD in North America. All of the box sets have been released by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (formerly Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment).

Television Reruns

In addition, the network TV One (which can be seen on Comcast cable systems as well as DirecTV) airs the show in a programming block with another African-American sitcom, 227.

The sitcom has also aired on TV Land as a 48-hour marathon the weekends of July 23, 2005, November 26, 2005, and May 6, 2006.

CBS also aired reruns of Good Times during the afternoons from 1976-78.

Adaptations

The British sitcom The Fosters (1976–1977), about a black family in England, was based on Good Times. In fact, The Fosters used many of the same scripts, after they had been adapted for the British audience.

Trivia

The Good Times Season Four box set. Note the similarities and differences between the picture and that of Season Two.
Enlarge
The Good Times Season Four box set. Note the similarities and differences between the picture and that of Season Two.

Catchphrases

Few television series spawned as many catchphrases as Good Times:

Songs

External links

References

1.↑  "Bad Times on the Good Times Set", Ebony, September 1975
2.↑  Mitchell, John L., "Plotting His Next Big Break", Los Angeles Times, April 18, 2006

 

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

Search Titles
0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJ
KLMNOPQRST
UVWXYZ?

E-mail this article to:

Personal Message: