That was hard, but I loved it … So many journalists have said to me, ‘She is such an unsympathetic character. She started off in one place and I had to take her on the voyage from one to the other and make it emotionally believable. “But as an actress, I had to go back and forth to what was very definitely written in the script. “None of this is written in stone, at least in real life,” Meredith told the North County Times. At the time, Meredith wrestled with the question of whether or not Betty was psychotic or simply getting vengeance. Over the years she starred in two dozen additional TV movies, though no doubt one of her most popular was A Woman Scorned: The Betty Broderick Story (1992), playing the woman who ultimately ended up murdering her ex-husband (played by Stephen Collins) and his new wife. Please scroll down to reacquaint yourself with the actors who brought the Lawrences to life on Family. What if the Lawrences of Pasadena, so palpably real on the tube each week, and so decent, turned out to be - unmasked - just another troupe of bored and cynical actors, cleverly putting us on at show time? Blessedly, this is not so … What comes through on the air is an affirmation of Leonard Goldberg’s original hunch - that the death knell of the traditional American family is not yet ready to be rung.”

In 1978, TV Guide wrote a piece on the show that enthusiastically began, “Those of us who regard Family as one of the most consistently fine hours on television are loath to peer into the program’s clockworks to see what makes it go. Meredith is older daughter Nancy, Gary is son Willie and and Kristy is Letitia, who has taken on the nick-name of “Buddy,” and it’s them living life, going through the dramas and the laughs that we all do, that allowed the show to connect with the audience in the way that it did. The concept is a pretty straight-forward one: Sada and James play Kate and Doug Lawrence, a middle-class couple living with their three kids in California.

Your Guide to 101 Classic TV Shows of the 1970s

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