Remembering "Kate & Allie" (1984-1989)

The TV comedy premise of two divorced women moving in together and re-starting their lives has found new life on Netflix: the streamer has two such shows, Grace & Frankie and Raven's Home. But the origin of this concept was Kate & Allie, a popular and very NYC-based show from the 1980s (on ... CBS!), that's largely forgotten today.

Kate and Allie are recently divorced middle-aged ladies with three children between them. They have moved into a Greenwich Village apartment, dealing with the challenges of single-parenting together, making up an impromtu family. While the show was "edgy" for '80s TV (Divorce! No men! Set in NYC!) it had your old-school basic sitcom format -- something would happen, hilarity and confusion would ensue, a resolution would be found, and important life lessons would be learned. It was unrelentingly wholesome, promoting "traditional family values."

And all on videotape!

Seinfeld this was not (in fact, it went off the air just a few weeks before that other classic NYC sitcom would premiere) but it was a smart, occasionally funny, and very white show, an artifact of its era. Kate was played by Susan Saint James (a popular actress from the 1970s show McMillan & Wife) and Allie was Jane Curtin (a few years after her run in the original cast of Saturday Night Live). Their kids were played by, among others, Alison Smith and Ari Meyers who went to mildly successful careers afterwards. 

A couple of interesting things about this show.

First, since it was about two women living together, and on TV during the Reagan era, CBS apparently told the producers to make it very, very clear that Kate and Allie were not lesbians. In fact, they tried to get each episode to end with them withdrawing into seperate bedrooms. The non-romantic nature of their relationship was hammered home a lot.

Second, Kate & Allie was a rare thing for the 1980s -- a show set and made in NYC (the only other sitcom shot here then was The Cosby Show). One thing that distinguished it from most sitcoms of its time was that each episode had a "cold open" where Kate and Allie (or their kids) would be filmed on the streets of NYC, with no audience or laugh track obviously, making an observation about the city and its people. It firmly established the show as rooted here and gave it a real city-vibe. As a kid who lived in NYC then, it was nice to see a show that took pride in being set here, unlike most shows that were set in anonymous suburbs in middle America.

I don't know if Kate & Allie is streaming anywhere but you can find lots of episodes of it on YouTube. Enjoy!