Another Damn Obit…

Yeah, I worked with John Ritter…once. But once was enough to see that he was a very nice guy who oozed professionalism. It was a silly, unimportant project for ABC for low money, and he was doing it as a favor to someone. Still, he was on time and prepared, and even though the producer had told him he'd be done in two hours, he didn't complain one bit when the taping ran twice that. That was my strongest impression about him and it stuck with me when I watched him on TV. Three's Company was a silly, unrealistic show but it worked, and I think the main reason it worked was that no matter what he was called on to do, Ritter was a pro, doing it about as well as a person could. He got every laugh in the script and then some, and when it was someone else's turn to get the laugh, he supported them with his reactions. Thereafter, he seemed to have an unerring knack for picking the wrong script. For a time, Penn and Teller once had a "bad movie" film society in New York that would convene every Saturday night in Times Square and go en masse to see the worst thing playing for several blocks around. It was always decided by majority rule except if "The John Ritter Rule" applied, meaning that if anything was playing with Ritter in it, no vote was necessary. The movies may have been bad but I doubt John was ever bad in any of them. Still, his career suffered for a time and it's good to remember that it didn't end there; that he had made a successful comeback with 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter.

The one afternoon I spent with him, he got to talking about some of the guest roles that had preceded his stardom on Three's Company. For a time, he was on everything. Most folks remember him as the minister who married Ted and Georgette on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but he was pleased I recalled a Bob Newhart Show in which he played a waiter in an ice cream parlor, and a M*A*S*H in which he was a soldier who went crazy. He told me that whenever he did a few days on some series, he would envy the actors who were on the show every week and wish they'd make him a regular. On Three's Company, which he was then doing, he knew that every actor they hired for one episode was thinking the same thing, and he told me he sometimes made a point of telling them, "I felt that way when I was in your position. And someday, you'll have a series and you'll be telling the same thing to your day players." I thought that was pretty classy. In fact, he struck me as a pretty classy guy. Still, as I followed his career thereafter, I often thought of the old line about Sammy Davis, Junior: "You wish someone would tell him that you're allowed to turn things down."