Why doesn't this show have any fans?

http://www.macleans.ca/authors/jaime-weinman/the-20th-anniversary-of-the-most-awesomest-tv-contract-dispute-ever/

The producers of the new show were Tom Miller and Bob Boyett, which seemed like an odd mix with Valerie Harper and NBC. Nearly all their previous productions had been for ABC, and they specialized in broad, sophomoric shows, whereas NBC was trying to sell itself as the home of more high-class comedy. But Miller-Boyett benefited from the same fortuitous circumstances as Chuck Lorre and a few other comedy producers benefit from today: they were among the only comedy producers available at a time when the demand for comedy unexpectedly shot up. The sitcom was “dead” in the early-to-mid ’80s, and most of the leading sitcom producers had already disbanded or gone into something else. Miller-Boyett, who had left Paramount and signed with Lorimar TV (which was later bought by Warner Brothers and no longer exists), were just about to give up on sitcoms and do hour-long family dramedies when The Cosby Show exploded, and the networks went begging and pleading for new sitcoms. And Miller-Boyett were among the few experienced people who could respond to all that begging and pleading.

So NBC set up a project for Valerie Harper, a product of the high-class MTM school of comedy, and Miller-Boyett, among the founders of the Happy Days/Laverne and Shirley school. To split the difference, the creator and writer of the pilot — the story of a woman with three sons and an airline-pilot husband with terrifying hair — was a guy who wasn’t really from either camp: Charlie Hauck had written for Maude and co-created one of my weekend flops, The Associates. (He later wrote a novel called Artistic Differences about writing a sitcom for a megalomaniacal diva star.) And NBC got their superstar director James Burrows to direct the pilot instead of Miller-Boyett’s usual people (they usually went with Joel Zwick). Harper brought on her husband, Tony Cacciotti, as a producer (in the Lucille Ball/Gary Morton tradition) and got a contract that called for her to have creative input as well as a cut of the profits. So as with many star-vehicle comedies before and after, the setup made it clear that no matter who the nominal producers were, the star was in charge.

Miller and Boyett’s specialty, apart from knowing exactly how to combine broad comedy with sappiness, was their quite phenomenal casting ability. (Bob Boyett is now one of Broadway’s most successful producers, drawing on those same instincts for crowd-pleasing material and casting.) They had never done a star vehicle before, instead preferring to pick actors who had only done guest parts on TV or small parts in movies and making them into leads: among the people Miller and/or Boyett elevated from bit-player to lead were Tom Hanks, Robert Hays, Peter Scolari, Robin Williams, Bob Saget, and Annie Potts. The other thing they were good at is figuring out which young actors could be a hit with their young-skewing audience. In casting Valerie, they realized that Jason Bateman, who had been kicking around shows like Silver Spoons and Little House on the Prairie and had played the lead on the flop It’s Your Move, was at the age where he had potential as a teen heartthrob: a good actor with good comic timing, good-looking enough to be appealing to girls and not so good-looking that boys would hate him. (This is, roughly, the Michael J. Fox template.) Casting soap actors in sitcoms was also a specialty of theirs, as they demonstrated by casting a guy from Days of Our Lives as Valerie’s husband.

The show that emerged was a very uneasy compromise between the type of show Harper expected to do and the type of show that Miller-Boyett preferred. Their specialty was re-tooling shows to fit prevailing trends and to emphasize any characters who caught on with the audience, while relying on a formula that called for very broad jokes and equally broad sentimentality (complete with sappy music). Valerie Harper and NBC were hoping for a family comedy with an edge, like The Cosby Show and Family Ties. So Valerie started out as an NBC-type show, but every week, Miller/Boyett would push it a little closer to their own kind of show, adding Edie McClurg’s “Mrs. Poole” character for wacky comedy value and building more and more stories around Jason Bateman, whom they correctly perceived as their best bet for keeping the show going. There were tabloid rumours at the time that Harper was resentful of Bateman, but Bateman has always denied that. What seems more likely is that she was resentful of the producers for turning her into a supporting player on her own show. (Meredith Baxter on Family Ties felt the same way, but Harper had even more reason to be P.O.’d, becaus the show was actually named after her and she owned a piece of it, yet it was being slowly taken away from her.) She said she was disappointed that not only she but the other characters were being neglected in favour of endless stories about Bateman’s girl troubles: “I wanted the little boys used more.” She reportedly told one of the producers: “I can’t do this to my career. I can’t stand in the kitchen and give advice to teenage boys.” What was supposed to be her career comeback had turned her, within a year, into just another generic sitcom mom.

But the story is fun, and even though this post turned out longer than it should have, there’s still a lot more that I haven’t even gotten into (as with all high-profile TV firings, the stuff that’s most interesting probably didn’t make it into the news articles). In some ways the story was a trial run for the ’90s, when the networks and their stars would actively struggle over the question of how much power a star should have as compared to the network or the producers. Roseanne, Cybill Shepherd, Brett Butler and others managed to have more power than Valerie Harper ever did, and that could be considered a by-product of her successful lawsuit, since she basically struck a blow for star power. But networks also moved toward ensemble shows where no one person dominated, even on shows created for and named after a particular person (this is NBC’s Seinfeld model, where the star of the show is consciously reduced to an equal partner in an ensemble). Today the true star-vehicle show is probably harder to find than it ever has been.

But what I like most about this story is that it’s almost a twisted version of a TV-land story that’s usually portrayed as noble and wonderful: the showrunners’ fight to make a show that’s true to their vision. What, after all, really happened here? Miller and Boyett didn’t want to make a show the way Valerie Harper was used to from her days at MTM. They didn’t want to make the kind of show that NBC wanted. They wanted to do their own kind of show — aimed at the lowest common denominator. They fought the star, they fought the network, and they won, emerging with a show that was worthy to stand with Full House and Family Matters. That’s the real fun of this particular story arc: Miller/Boyett and their loyal team of writers and producers — the creatives, in other words — fought the suits and the star, and they won the fight to make the show they dreamed of making. Except that the star and the suits wanted quality TV, and the creatives wanted to make family-friendly schlock. I do love it so.

Well like some of the threads say Valerie Harper could not come with agreement with the contract or was asking for more money and that is why she was written off. I was not too happy about Valerie getting written off because she seemed like she made the show interesting but you cannot complain though it lasted for at least 4 or 5 years for a show. I liked this show a lot! I wish that ABC Family would bring it back on again, Nick@Nite could show this, or even TV Land as well but I have only seen very few channels show this show. A simple answer as to why this show does not have any fans at all is because this show as not hyped up or liked like The Cosby Show, Full House, Roseanne, or any other show that is popular because the TV station did not promote the show. Possibly not too many people paid attention to this great show as well. Those are some reasons there as to why not too many people like the show. Also another reason is that I have not seen this show go on syndication like other shows either or shown on stations after this show went off the air like a few shows above that I mentioned.