‘Three’s Company’ Producers Didn’t Respect Women, According to Suzanne Somers and Joyce DeWitt
Chauvinism definitely played a role on 1970s sitcom smash Three’s Company, Joyce DeWitt told Suzanne Somers in 2012. But it was also about creative and financial control. Producers simply could not respect…
“Women!” interjected Somers.
“Feminine contribution,” agreed DeWitt.
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For Somers, frustration centered on compensation. “You and I deserved to be paid equal with what the men were being paid, is my feeling,” she said. (“Men,” in this case, referred to John Ritter, who made five times what Somers was earning. Complaining about the wage gap and demanding equality with actors like M*A*S*H’s Alan Alda cost Somers her job.)
For DeWitt’s part, she was frustrated about her inability to make creative contributions without secret help from male pals. Her suggestions for cuts and changes, especially in the show’s first season, were ignored by the men in charge, DeWitt writes in Come and Knock on Our Door: A Hers and Hers and His Guide to Three’s Company. The actor was used to collaboration in theater but found herself “up against a cement wall” with the show’s producers.
“It’s the only time in my career that I’ve come up against that — before or since,” she said. “(Producers) were very chauvinistic when it came to whose input they would take.”
It was clear who the powers-that-be at Three’s Company listened to. DeWitt noticed that every time Ritter had a suggestion about a joke or story beat, “my producers would fall over themselves trying to say ‘Yes’ first.”
So she devised a scheme with a sympathetic Ritter. Rather than waste time fighting on-set arguments, she privately shared her concerns with Ritter. If he disagreed, no problem. If he thought she had a good idea, he’d make the suggestion without mentioning DeWitt at all. The producers, of course, loved “Ritter’s” ideas. “We did it,” she said, “and it worked like a charm.”
Somers agreed with DeWitt about producers’ desire to please Ritter. “It was very clear that John was their favorite,” she said. “But I didn’t care. I was just happy to be there.” (In the early seasons, anyway.)
DeWitt came up with another strategy when producers didn’t want input on her character. “Slowly and subtly, so they wouldn’t notice, I began to move Janet in a direction that I felt was right,” she said. “And by the middle of the second season, I was beginning to feel comfortable with her.”
As for the producers? They loved DeWitt’s performance, even as they didn’t notice that she was gradually incorporating the changes she’d fought for a season earlier. “They told me I was crazy,” DeWitt remembered.
Executive producer Michael Ross more or less shrugged when asked about alleged chauvinism on Three’s Company. “If it was a concern,” he said, “(the actresses) never spoke to me about it.”
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