Sara: The Lost Geena Davis Sitcom
By Michael Jones | June 5, 2021
Stop the presses! Shut the front door! Hold the tomato! You mean to tell me there was a 1985 sitcom that had this cast of well known names: Geena Davis. Alfre Woodard. Bronson Pinchot. Bill Maher. Ronnie Claire Edwards.
You bet your last Jolt Cola there was!
We’re talking about NBC’s Sara, a 13-episode series from the creators of Family Ties that was a starring vehicle for a young Geena Davis. And if you watch just even one episode, your takeaway is going to be: “Oh, she’s going to win an Oscar someday.”
Dubbed by reviewers at the time as a 1980s version of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, the premise rests on the staff of a legal aid clinic in San Francisco. Rather, make that a bunch of single people thirsty for dates and sex who work at a legal aid clinic.
Davis is a fresh-out-of-law-school attorney naturally named Sara with a killer core around her: best friend and coworker Rozalyn (Woodard), a newbie lawyer named Dennis who’s also extremely gay (Pinchot), a smarmy creep lawyer named Marty (Maher), and Helen the neurotic office manager who’s part matriarch and part gossip queen (Edwards). Together they run an office with so much sitcom chemistry, it practically oozes out of the television and onto the floor.
And lucky for us all a few episodes exist out there in the YouTubeverse. Episode 2, “Sara’s Mom,” is sitcom gold. Sara’s mother (played deliciously by veteran actress K Callan, who some might remember as a lesbian named Veronica from a classic episode of All In The Family) comes to town for a visit and rags on Sara for being too single, having dishes that are too chipped, having silverware that’s too rusty, even having a double broiler is too slimy (the horror!). Davis’ Sara flips out on her mom who then decides she’s going to pack up her bags and leave. Sara’s mom turns to Bronson Pinchot’s Dennis character and says:
“Dennis, is everything your mother says all wrong?”
“ALWAYS,” Dennis says. “Always. How do you know my mother?”
Mmm, zingers for those who’ve been driven nuts by our mothers!
Or if you want some legal chemistry, there’s episode 3, “Dueling Lawyers,” where Sara goes up against Bill Maher’s Marty in a divorce case involving two of Sara’s friends. The whole episode slaps, but what really pops is how good the cast connects with each other. Maher is mix of Dabney Coleman from 9 to 5 and John Larroquette from Night Court, which makes him an easy foil for the optimistic and rosy Davis. And while the show lacks the zaniness of Night Court, it’s hard to watch an episode like this and not find yourself smiling and rooting for this cast to succeed.
Of course, the reason not many people know about Sara is because it came and went in about 4 months. Even the cast’s chemistry couldn’t save it from airing opposite Dynasty, one of the most popular TV shows in 1985. Yet while Joan Collins and her slaps might have knocked Sara out of NBC’s TV lineup, it does hold a nice little place in 80s TV history.
For starters, Bronson Pinchot’s Dennis became one of the few openly gay characters to be a mainstay on a network sitcom at the time. Co-creator Ruth Bennett told the LA Times that the team behind Sara didn’t think it was that big of a deal.
“I guess it will get a lot of attention, but when we came up with the character, we thought, perhaps naively, that it wasn’t such a big deal. After we set the show in San Francisco, we decided, considering the arithmetic, that it would be perfectly normal to have a gay man,” Bennett said.
But Sara’s also interesting because it had a second life, albeit 3 years after it aired. It was canceled in May 1985, which maybe was a blessing in disguise for Geena Davis. A year later, she starred in The Fly which made her much more of a household name, and then in 1988 she starred in Beetlejuice and yowsa she became a powerhouse. Which was why NBC decided to re-air the show in the summer of 1988, filling a half-hour block between The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd and The Bronx Zoo. And while it’s not unusual for a canceled show to have some rerun life, it’s super unusual for a short-lived sitcom to have its reruns air during primetime broadcast television several years later. Thank you, box office success of Geena Davis!
Sara may not be well known today, but there’s an easy argument to make that it cobbled together an all-star cast that might be among the strongest of any 1980s show. Woodard (who already had won an Emmy for Hill Street Blues and been nominated for an Oscar for Cross Creek by the time she starred in Sara) would jump to St. Elsewhere and would win another Emmy as a guest star in the pilot episode of LA Law, before going on to have an incredible movie and TV career for the next 35+ years. Pinchot would jump to ABC’s “TGIF” juggernaut Perfect Strangers. And Maher would continue stand-up and dabble in acting before Politically Incorrect would make him a staple of late night comedy.
Oh, and Geena Davis would go on to get that Oscar, for The Accidental Tourist. Among making dozens of other films and TV shows while leading the charge in Hollywood to make it more inclusive and equitable (work that would get her a second Oscar in the form of the Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 2019). So the best part of Sara is watching Davis on the show and knowing that a true star is being born.
Treat yourself to some smiles and fall down the YouTube rabbit hole for Sara. And just try not to tap your foot to the theme song, “You Got What It Takes,” more or less a sister song to “Without Us” from Family Ties (and created by the same composer).
Geena Davis, Alfre Woodard, Bronson Pinchot, Ronnie Claire Edwards and Bill Maher: you got what it takes for a truly pleasurable nostalgic sitcom steeped in peak 1980s TV.
An unabashed 80s & 90s pop culture junkie, Michael Jones is a Brooklyn-based writer and co-host of the Pop Trash Podcast.