Season 4 is bizarre !

Have to admit my interest with season 4 is not the same as the first 3 seasons either. I'm still taping every day but not watching them the way I was before.

I was too young when it was on the first time around to remember the seasons individually. Does season 5 get better? Hope so ---from the episodes I've been watching for season 4 I'm bored with the show at this point.

"Thats just my opinion...I could be wrong."-Dennis Miller

Personally I love season 4 and it's my favourite of all 6 seasons. Things certainly don't get any better in the final 2 years!

I have a poll on my fame blog and season 4 is way out in front in popularity. Check it out at:

http://kidsfromfamemedia.blogspot.com/

Season 1 was good as we established the core cast and the episodes felt solid and upbeat. The audience connected with the energy and optimistic nature of the show.

However in season 2 things got very heavy. I actually refer to it as the season of death as so many characters have a storyline related to the death of someone else Sherwood, Doris, Coco, the whole school when Crandal dies but particularly Danny. Plus there are is a suicide storyline where a couple of guest stars are on the verge of killing themselves. It was a bit hard to have a feel good sing song after that!

Also there are way too many guest stars coming on the show. Being in the U.K I'd never heard of most of these people and found it frustrating they they pretty much took over the episodes they were in and the regular cast got ignored. Audience figures dropped and the show was cancelled by NBC. Still a huge hit in the U.K. but the second season was only just starting here the BBC went to MGM with a deal to continue the show and it went into first run syndication.

The 3rd season was an improvement but by the time Erica Gimpel left we reverted to episodes filled with guest stars and the stample storyline of doomed love! Where a guest star would come on for an episode fall madly in love with a character and it all be over for some reason by the end of the episode.

With the exit of Bill Blinn as executive producer new people were brought in for the 4th season and the cast revamped. Stories were a little lighter and more fun and much more High School related. They concentrated on the cast rather than the boring guest stars. Yes there were more fantasy sequences but in some ways this made the show more realistic because it was hard to believe some of those song and dance numbers could ever spontaniously just errupt in real life so making it a fantasy made it easier to believe what we were seeing.

Season 5 was okay but the writers seemed to rely on creating episodes around established stories like "scrooge", "Sherloch Holmes", "Jekyll and Hyde", "Hucklebury Finn" etc... Some worked but some were dreadful. At least
the core characters Nicole, Danny. Jesse, Chris and Leroy get lots to do this season although the new characters brought in get very little development.

Season 6 saw the introduction of new executive producers and again the style of the show changed. Even more new people were brought on playing inferior chacters that never got developed properly and by now so many old favourites had gone. Nia Peeples was unhappy and asked for more to do as Nicole was pretty much being ignored. She was told no and left the show only for the new guys to kill Nicole off screen. It was pretty much the end and the show got cancelled that year.

I too heard Lee say he left because the producers didn't pick up his contract. He has also said that he felt he was viewed as a trouble maker because the original producers didn't want to share the music royalties with him. So when he was playing music on the show particularly music he had writen technically he should have been paid extra and had to battle the producers to get what he was due.

Cynthia Gibb took a break from Fame at the start of the 4th season and was off filming the movie "Young Blood" when the "Heart of Rock n Roll" concerts were performed so that's why she didn't appear. She was briefly mentioned by Valerie Landsburg in the 2nd part but they didn't explain during the show why she wasn't there.


The bad sound mix on the Much More Music screening on the 4th season is not a problenm the original broadcasts had. For some reason some of these episodes were given a soundtrack remix where the background noise is brought forward in the mix and at times drowns out the people speaking. The original broadcasts had no such problems.