The series was conceived by Miller and Boyett as a male counterpart to their hit sitcom
Laverne & Shirley. They originally pitched it as a straightforward buddy comedy done in what they described as "a sophisticated
Billy Wilder kind of way." When ABC executives asked Miller and Boyett to explain what they meant by the comparison to Wilder, the producers mentioned
Some Like It Hot (directed by Wilder) and ABC bought the show on condition that it would include men in women's clothing, just like that movie. "We weren't there to pitch that," Miller recalled. "And they jumped on it! We drove back to the studio in the car saying, 'Oh my God, what are we gonna do? We have to do something in drag. After the cast had been chosen, Miller and Boyett asked Chris Thompson, one of the writer-producers of
Laverne & Shirley, to write the pilot and be the series
showrunner. Thompson (who would go on to executive-produce such shows as
The Larry Sanders Show) said later that he took the job purely for the money, but unexpectedly found it to be "my completely favorite experience in show business", because the network left him and his young cast free to experiment. "We were left alone," he recalled. "Nobody was paying attention to us. We were all really young, but it was like we had daddy's Porsche. We had $500,000 to play with every week." Although the series is set in New York,
Bosom Buddies was taped on Stage 25 at
Paramount Studios in
Los Angeles. Stage 25 was also the home of
The Lucy Show,
Cheers, and its spin-off
Frasier. Like many other sitcoms that aired during the 1980–81 television season,
Bosom Buddies felt the effects of a strike by the
Screen Actors Guild and
American Federation of Television and Radio Artists that occurred in 1980. As a result, the show had an abbreviated first season. At first, its ratings were strong. However, ABC kept switching the show's day and time slots, which hurt the first season's overall standing. The second season, with its revised premise, fared even worse, and after more time slot changes by the network, the show was canceled in the spring of 1982. Ironically, the last line of the series (season 2, episode 18 "Not the Last Picture Show") was, "You know, no matter how old I get now, I'll never get tired of watching this."
Bosom Buddies was one of the last shows to use the Miller-Milkis-Boyett production team due to Eddie Milkis leaving the company in 1984. This was also one of the last Miller-Boyett sitcoms to be produced by
Paramount Television (now
CBS Television Studios) before they moved their base of operations to
Lorimar Productions (later
Warner Bros. Television);
Happy Days ended its run in 1984, making the latter the last program to meet cancellation before the Miller-Boyett move to Lorimar, with
Valerie being the first since to debut. ==Episodes==