Mindy Cohn didn’t hold back any punches as to the reason why The Facts of Life reboot never happened. And she’s blaming a “greedy b*tch” of a co-star.
The 58-year-old actress shared the sentiment during an appearance on SiriusXM’s Jeff Lewis Live show, where she recounted how the idea of a revival first came to be. As she tells it, it was the late Norman Lear who came up with the idea following the success of Live in Front of a Studio Audience: The Facts of Life.
“We had all never really talked about it, but we all started to consider it a little bit and we got into talks and we hired a writer and the four of us got together on Zooms,” Cohn said. “This was during COVID, and we had meetings with Norman about it.”
The Facts of Life, which aired for nine seasons between 1979 and 1988, followed the housemother of a dormitory at a private all-girls school in Peekskill, New York. The series, a spinoff of Diff’rent Strokes, starred Cohn, the late Charlotte Rae, Lisa Whelchel, Kim Fields and Nancy McKeon.
But the reboot never came to be. And as Cohn describes it, it “was not cute” because “there was drama.” Cohn wouldn’t name the co-star, but she assured everyone it wasn’t her but “one of the girls.”
“[She] went behind our backs and tried to make a separate deal for a spinoff just for herself and devastated the rest of us who we all, you know, I had booked Palm Royale, another girl is working,” Cohn continued. “I’m just saying it was for a 40-year friendship and sisterhood, there was a tidal wave of emotion around it.”
Cohn added, “Greedy b*tch. I’ll say it.”
The ordeal, Cohn says, led her to have “no desire to ever work together.” As for any chance of a revival, Cohn is adamant that “it’s very dead.” In essence, she says, they’ve all reached a point of no return.
“A couple of people can’t move past it, don’t want to move past it. We are not as united. Let me put it that way,” she said. “We were united for 40 years over not talking about each other, not doing dirty, not, you know, all for one, one for all, and this kind of wrecked that, which is sad. Really sad.”
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