Funny Face and The Sandy Duncan Show are two American sitcoms starring Sandy Duncan that aired on CBS from September 18 to December 11, 1971, and September 17 to December 31, 1972, respectively. In both shows, Duncan played Sandy Stockton, a young woman from a small town attending UCLA to be a teacher and filming commercials on the side to earn money. Although Funny Face was a ratings success, CBS cancelled it at midseason as Duncan recovered from a life-threatening illness. It was overhauled as The Sandy Duncan Show, which failed to build an audience and was cancelled at midseason as well.
Funny Face
Plot Sandy Stockton is a UCLA student from Taylorville, Illinois, majoring in education and making ends meet by working part-time as an actress in TV commercials for the Prescott Advertising Agency. In the pilot, the supporting cast includes Nita Talbot as Maggie Prescott, Sandy's modeling agent and best friend, and Frank Aletter as Dick, a photographer for the agency, who also happens to be Maggie's ex-husband. After the pilot, Talbot and Aletter were dropped. The series featured Valorie Armstrong, as Sandy's best friend and neighbor Alice McRaven, and Henry Beckman and Kathleen Freeman, as Pat and Kate Harwell, Sandy's landlords. Beckman had been featured in the pilot as a telephone repairman.
Cast
Main cast
Sandy Duncan as Sandy Stockton Valorie Armstrong as Alice McRaven Henry Beckman as Pat Harwell Kathleen Freeman as Kate Harwell
Notable guest cast
Tom Bosley Lillian Bronson Michael Callan Jack De Mave Sandra Gould Peter Graves Jonathan Harris Bernie Kopell Mike Lookinland Monte Markham Shelley Morrison Benny Rubin William Schallert Avery Schreiber Richard Stahl Amzie Strickland Ann Morgan Guilbert David Doyle
Production Before Sandy Duncan made her prime-time television debut, she was a young actress known primarily for her work in theater. She launched her career in New York. She received praise for her performances at City Center in 1966–1967 and Tony Award nominations for her roles in the musical Canterbury Tales (1969) and the revival of the musical The Boy Friend (1970), her breakout performance. In 1970 she signed for her film debut in Disney's The Million Dollar Duck, for which she would receive positive reviews. Around the same time her face became widely known in California through her humorous portrayal of a harried young bank teller patiently dealing with difficult customers in a series of UCB (United California Bank) commercials. Through these projects, she became typecast as a cute, perky, slightly nutty all-American sweetheart, an image she would find hard to shed.
Fred Silverman, a young television executive recently promoted to vice president, programs, at CBS Television, saw Duncan in The Boy Friend and believed she could be a television star. In summer 1970, he signed her to a deal that included a commitment to film a pilot for the 1971–1972 television season. At the time he was in the midst of a radical overhaul of CBS's prime-time schedule that involved dropping the network's rural comedies and variety shows and adding more sophisticated programs to attract the young, urban viewers advertisers desired—what became known as the "rural purge." Variety reported that CBS was developing five properties for Duncan. It eventually settled on a sitcom loosely inspired by the Paramount film Funny Face (1957), which stars Audrey Hepburn. Paramount Television had originally developed this project for Sandra Dee a few years prior and sent it to Silverman as a vehicle for Melba Moore, but he believed the role suited Duncan better. During development, the show's premise was tailored to Duncan's own life: Like Duncan, Sandy Stockton, the character she played, was a young woman from a small town who moved to a large city and became famous for her work in television commercials.
Silverman personally shepherded Funny Face, but conflicts between CBS and Carl Kleinschmitt, the show's creator and producer, undermined it from the beginning. Production of the pilot began in November 1970. In the pilot, Duncan's character Sandy Stockton must choose between a date with a shy bookstore clerk and a photo assignment. Kleinschmitt commented that it "compounded cotton candy on top of sugar." After Silverman viewed it and the second episode, he shut down production for four weeks: "They were turning Sandy Duncan into Mary Poppins, for Christ's sakes. Show would have been a failure. It'll cost us $100,000 to shut down, but it'll be worth it because the scripts will improve." In May 1971, The Hollywood Reporter reported that the pilot would not be the series premiere (it ultimately aired as the last episode) and that the show would emphasize Sandy Stockton's life at UCLA more than her acting career.
After the pilot was filmed, conflicts between Silverman and Kleinschmitt persisted. Silverman insisted that television viewers tuned in to see stars and that the show's success therefore hinged on Duncan. Kleinschmitt, by contrast, wanted to develop the supporting cast, as the producers of The Mary Tyler Moore Show had done with great success; yet, the network objected. As scripts were continually rewritten, the supporting cast fluctuated—Sandy Stockton's agent and photographer were dropped after the pilot; her landlords were introduced to replace them and then deemphasized; and eventually her neighbor and friend Alice became more central. In October 1971, after several episodes had been filmed, The Hollywood Reporter stated that the landlords would be replaced by "a former middle linebacker who wears an apron and does domestic duties at home," while his wife "goes to work every day as a technical analyst in a systems corporation."
Shortly after filming of the series began on June 2, 1971, Duncan began to develop headaches, excruciating pain in her left eye, and weight loss (her weight dropped from about 105 pounds to the 80s). Journalists often described her as looking tired or frail. At first she attributed her condition to stress: She knew the show's success depended on her, but did not feel confident enough to assert herself. After the series ended, she commented: "The network couldn't make up its mind how it ought to go. A script that was fine one week was unacceptable the next. It was change, change, change. Adjust, adjust, adjust. And it was all on my shoulders, they said." Her husband Bruce Scott stated that she was unhappy with how the series was going. At the end of August she was hospitalized at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles for what was described as a "collapse" and a "minor eye ailment." Eventually, she was diagnosed with inflammation of the optic nerve and given cortisone injections. Yet, her health worsened. At the same time, her marriage deteriorated. She separated from Scott in August, and on October 13 filed for divorce. Days later she was admitted to UCLA Medical Center for tests. Using new X-ray technology, her neurologist discovered a fibroid tumor the size of a walnut behind her left eye. On November 1 she had surgery to remove the tumor, which was benign.
Up to the time she was hospitalized at UCLA, Duncan continued to work on Funny Face, which premiered on September 18, 1971, as one of eight new shows on CBS's prime-time schedule. Silverman placed it on Saturday night at 8:30 pm, slotting it and another new sitcom, The New Dick Van Dyke Show at 9 pm, between two hit series that attracted young, urban audiences—All in the Family at 8 pm and The Mary Tyler Moore Show at 9:30 pm, followed by Mission Impossible at 10 pm. Yet, while Funny Face benefited from being sandwiched in this lineup, it seemed conventional in comparison to the other shows. Before the show premiered, Duncan herself said there was nothing new or different about it, and after it ended, she characterized it as old-fashioned. Even Silverman said that his boss Bob Wood bet him that it would flop. In an interview decades later, he admitted that it was "a dog … it wasn't any good … just awful."
Nevertheless, Funny Face was an immediate ratings success. Despite this success, it was cancelled in November 1971 because of Duncan's illness. At the time, only 13 episodes had been filmed. Silverman and Paramount stated that their concern for Duncan motivated the cancellation and that a new series starring the actress would be developed for the 1972–1973 season. Duncan's first appearance on national television after her surgery was on the January 4, 1972 episode of The Dick Cavett Show. Wearing large glasses and a wig to cover the scar on her head, she announced she had recovered but was permanently blind in her left eye. For her many years false rumors circulated that she had a glass eye.
Reception Funny Face was the most highly rated new comedy of the 1971–1972 season. For the week ending September 19, 1971, it ranked 20. It continued to perform well in the following weeks. For example, for the week ending September 26, it ranked 6; October 3: 18; October 10: 13; October 17: 11; October 24: 18; October 31: 15; and November 7: 7. At the end of the season, it ranked as the eighth most popular show of the season with a rating of 23.9.
Despite its popular success, initial reviews of Funny Face were mostly negative. In a full-page review in TV Guide, Cleveland Amory declared: "The fact is, the show is thin. Good as Miss Duncan is, she is in almost every single bit of the humor. Too often it's just too much. Before the end of the show, you get tired of the effort, if not of her." The New York Times panned the show: "'Funny Face' is constructed as a showcase for Sandy Duncan, an attractive performer whose particular brand of cuteness monopolized the reviews in a recent Broadway revival of 'The Boy Friend.' The TV problem is how to harness that cuteness without falling into the sticky Doris Day pit, how to make Sandy a cutely gutsy version of 'real people.' The opening episode … didn't succeed. Sandy just looked tired, or perhaps a bit bored." The Hollywood Reporter opined: "Sadly but surely, Sandy Duncan's new series 'Funny Face' is one of the biggest disappointments of the '71–'72 television season. Her performance, except when she delivers commercials within the program, is wooden, lacking the sparkle, charm and vitality that had viewers skipping refrigerator breaks to see her on bank ads." Variety declared: "Newcomer 'Funny Face' is, at the moment, all Sandy Duncan. Big-eyed, frail, wholesome, peppy and spunky, she projects the image of the smalltown ex-cheerleader loose in the big city—and apparently that image is the peg the series is hung on. Unless someone finds a way to turn on some laughs, that 'hung on' could turn into 'hung up on' quite rapidly." Life stated: "She deserves better … from the joyboys at CBS who 'packaged' such a 'valuable property' into such a mediocre sitcom. That Funny Face appears to be doing well in the ratings is a triumph of individual talent over corporate witlessness." By contrast, the Los Angeles Times was more enthusiastic: "Funny Face is a delight. Sandy Duncan, starring in her first TV series, is wide-eyed, eager, innocent, bright, and completely adorable. The script is light and snappy."