Several of you have sent me links to this article about Welcome Back, Kotter, a show I worked on in days of yore.
I have not yet ordered the new boxed set. You can here but I'm waiting for someone at the Shout Factory to call and ask me a favor, as they do from time to time. I don't really have an overpowering urge to watch the episodes I worked on again. I TiVoed them off MeTV and they're just sitting there, unviewed by me because other shows I've recorded interest me more. And I have zero interest in watching the ones done before or after I was on staff.
So, not that I think anyone would but don't buy this set because of me.
Anyway, the piece says "Behind the scenes, things weren't so cozy. [Gabe] Kaplan was reportedly so temperamental that by the third season he and [Marcia] Strassman were barely speaking to each other." I was gone by the third season but during the second, Gabe was a joy to work with and, I thought, a guy who had very little ego and a good, healthy idea of how to be the star of a situation comedy.
It was true that things weren't cozy and that Gabe and Marcia weren't getting along but the problem wasn't Kaplan. The problem there was that everyone — meaning the producers and the network — had decided that Welcome Back, Kotter wasn't a show about the wife of a school teacher. The "gold" was in featuring the Sweathogs — John Travolta, Bobby Hegyes, Larry Hilton-Jacobs and Ron Palillo.
And from where I sat, the bigger cause of open warfare on the series was that Jimmie Komack and Gabe were fighting for control and neither thought the other knew what he was doing. As a general rule of thumb, when the star of the series and the Executive Producer hate each other, you do not have a happy set. Or the best possible show. Or a place I wanted to keep working.
My partner of the time (Dennis Palumbo) and I worked on a few of the episodes singled out in this article. One of them started with a script that had been written by an outside writer. We on the staff began rewriting it and rewriting it and when it aired, it contained not a trace of that writer's dialogue and had only the vaguest connection to his plot. Still, it ran with his screen credit on it because that's the way we did it on that series.
The day after it aired, the outside writer called one of our producers about something and casually inquired as to the if and when of his script possibly being produced. The producer told him, "It was on last night." The writer responded, "Oh, that was mine? Gee, I thought it was a pretty good episode but I didn't catch the credits."