When
Alex Karras and
Susan Clark married in real life, they started their own production company, Georgian Bay Ltd. ABC approached the couple about a sitcom development deal which resulted in a proposed romantic-comedy series,
Another Ballgame, to star Karras as an ex-NFL player who quickly found true love with a socialite consumer advocate (Clark) on a cruise. ABC picked it up for the fall 1983 schedule, with
Paramount Television as packager, but major changes would occur before the premiere. After seeing
Emmanuel Lewis in a
Burger King commercial, ABC's programming chief, Lew Erlicht, wanted to give the actor his own series. At this time,
Another Ballgame creator Stu Silver desired to develop an original show based on the lead characters portrayed by
Katharine Hepburn and
Spencer Tracy in the film
Woman of the Year and saw Alex Karras and Susan Clark's on-screen chemistry as being strikingly reminiscent of this. The network felt the need to cast Lewis in a project quickly, before he grew another inch (like child actor
Gary Coleman, who was also small for his age, Lewis would end up at ). With the number of comedy
pilots ABC had greenlit for that fall's schedule, it was likely that Lewis would not be able to secure his own series and timeslot unless he was worked into already-existing comedy projects. So, among other series, co-producers on
Another Ballgame were approached about working Lewis into the show. Stars Karras and Clark liked the idea of the sudden marriage and instant adoption of a young black boy, and the Webster character was thus created. The premise of Webster's parents' death, and his inclusion into the Papadopoulos household, originated with the second phase of the pilot, which had the show's title changed to
Then Came You. Executives soon made it clear that the show's major focus would be on the Webster character, instead of it being a split romantic/family comedy. The character of George Papadopolis' buddy and broadcasting colleague, played by
Art LaFleur, was summarily dropped from the regular cast; once getting to air, LaFleur only appeared in the pilot. Karras and Clark did not approve this round of changes, as creative control was still in their hands with Georgian Bay. However, Clark originally prevented their co-producers and ABC from changing the series' title to
Webster, since she wanted to maintain the ensemble aspect of the series. While early promotions for the sitcom carried the title
Then Came You, network politics would end up violating Clark's request; ABC executives ultimately settled on
Webster just before its fall premiere.
Webster premiered in September 1983 and was an instant hit. From the start, the final product was drawing close comparisons to NBC's popular ''Diff'rent Strokes'', which featured the diminutive Gary Coleman as a young black boy adopted by a white family. The main differences, however, were that Lewis' character of Webster Long had an adoptive mother and father from the start who had no children, whereas Coleman's character Arnold Jackson and his older brother Willis (
Todd Bridges) were adopted by a widower with a daughter Kimberly (
Dana Plato). Also, Coleman's short stature was due to a congenital kidney condition, whereas Lewis was completely healthy and had no pre-existing condition to explain his height. Eventually, in the fall of 1985,
Webster would be joined on ABC's Friday night lineup by ''Diff'rent Strokes'', when the latter moved to ABC for what turned out to be its eighth and final season. Despite the early success, the show that made it to the air as
Webster was not what Karras and Clark foresaw as their ideal starring vehicle. The first season was fraught with tension, between the couple's disagreements and their protests with
Paramount and ABC. After the initial episodes that set up the show's premise (George and Katherine's wedding, Webster's arrival, and the resulting adjustments) were shot, most of the plots became exclusively Webster-driven, even though it was the writers' intention to include story elements that focused on George and Katherine as much as possible. The show's married stars won many of the early script disputes, and several first-season episodes did focus on the new marriage and lives of the adult leads. The in-fighting on set continued, and especially had an effect on Lewis. Reportedly, Lewis was often whisked away from the set whenever Karras and Clark argued and demanded rewrites. It became so severe that Lewis blamed the trouble on himself. ,
Emmanuel Lewis,
Alex Karras|right|150px After the first season ended, ABC stopped pushing hard for "all Webster, all the time". Paramount eventually came to an agreement with Karras and Clark that they would continue to receive prominent storylines for their characters. In the long run, the series did become part romantic and part family-oriented, as Clark and Karras wanted it to be; the series was also regarded for handling Webster's childhood stories in a more sophisticated, intelligent fashion than other comedies of the time that relied on preachy, heavy-handed morals to tell a story. The only condition that Paramount laid out for Clark and Karras was that Lewis, whom ABC saw as a money maker above all else, would get production credit alongside them. As a result, "Emmanuel Lewis Entertainment Enterprises, Inc." was launched in 1986, acting as another production company for
Webster starting in its fourth season. By season three at the latest, the stormy relations of the first season disappeared on set. The main cast bonded well from then on, with Karras becoming a surrogate father figure to Lewis.
Webster director
Joel Zwick, in his interview for the 2003
E! True Hollywood Story on Lewis, remarked that, "As far as TV sitcom families go, it took them longer than most to acclimate to each other." Over the course of the fourth season, ratings dropped sharply. The show, which had been a
Nielsen top 30 series, ranked 46th by the end of the season. Although ABC still saw Lewis especially as a bankable star, having recently featured him in his first self-headlined prime-time special (
Emmanuel Lewis: My Very Own Show, which aired in February 1987 and featured Lewis performing alongside
Sammy Davis Jr.,
Bob Hope and other big-name celebrities), the network felt that
Webster was past its peak in terms of ratings, and was unsure that it would ever regain the higher numbers it had during the early seasons. Having been the Friday night 8 p.m. anchor since March 1985,
Webster moved back to the "protected" time slot of 8:30/7:30 on Fridays in March 1987. ABC announced the series' cancellation in May.
Cancellation and move to syndication Even though
Webster had seen its overall ratings decline leading into its cancellation, the series had always drawn a large audience of younger viewers; in fact,
Webster's largest audience was children. At the time of the cancellation of
Webster by ABC, there was a trend in
syndication of seeing various television series that had been cancelled by the three major networks find new life as weekly syndicated series (examples of the time including
Too Close for Comfort, ''
Mama's Family, Charles in Charge, Fame, 9 to 5, It's a Living, and Punky Brewster). Even before Webster'' fell out of the Nielsen top 30 on ABC, Paramount had signed an exclusive deal with the show's producers to continue the show in first-run syndication if the network eventually had reason to cancel it before it reached its 100th episode. (This package deal also gave the same option to the Paramount-produced
Cheers and
Family Ties, if either of them were to see an early demise on
NBC, but both series enjoyed long runs on that network.) Although
Webster managed to hit its hundredth episode at the end of its final season on ABC, Paramount decided to exercise their option to keep the show in production. By doing this Paramount was no longer bound by network standards and could easily target the young audience that made up the majority of its
Webster viewer base. Paramount's
syndication arm began a drive to sell the series to local stations, and enough bought the series to enable a fifth season to be produced.
Webster's fifth season premiered in syndication on September 21, 1987, with a three-episode story arc which saw Webster, George, and Katherine head to San Francisco. Beginning with the fourth episode of the season, the Papadopolis household gained a new member in George's nephew Nicky (
Corin Nemec), who moved in when his parents went off to work in
Nigeria on assignment for the
United Nations. Nicky provided Webster with a sort of "brother figure", and the two got along famously. However, Nicky was gone from the show at the start of season six (Nemec would later reach greater fame as the star of
Fox's ''
Parker Lewis Can't Lose''). Although no longer a regular when the series moved to first-run syndication, Papa Papadopolis continued to make a few guest appearances during the fifth and sixth seasons, as did Webster's friend Tommy and malt shop owner Benny. While the lead character's plots continued to mature somewhat with Webster's onset of pre-teendom, the same "cutesy factor" remained, thanks in part to Lewis' timing and portrayal. However, this was something Lewis was slowly tiring of, despite the fact that he had more creative control over
Webster at this point. Now 17 years old and about to complete his high school education (which was followed by his enrollment at
Clark Atlanta University in 1989), Lewis did not have the desire to continue portraying a character roughly half his age. Ultimately, due to Lewis' height, the character of Webster Long was only depicted between the ages of 6 and 12 years old over the show's six seasons. Early in the 1988–89 season, with Lewis clearly outgrowing the title role, Karras and Clark also decided that the time was right to move on.
Webster's sixth season was announced to be its last, with the finale airing on March 10, 1989. Instead of a typical series finale, the last episode—titled "Webtrek"—saw Webster go on an adventure aboard the Starship
Enterprise from the series' Paramount-produced sibling,
Star Trek: The Next Generation. There, he interacts with Lt. Worf (
Michael Dorn) from
TNG, whom Webster attempts to humanize, while a series of
Webster flashbacks are shown that depict the concept of feelings. ==Cast==