Who's the Boss at 40

Forty years after Who’s the Boss? premiered, creators and cast members recall what makes this groundbreaking sitcom so special. The autumn of 1984 boasted some impressive historic firsts: A woman, Geraldine Ferraro, ran for vice president on a major U.S. party’s ticket. Another woman, Kathryn D. Sullivan, performed a spacewalk. And in Connecticut, an advertising exec hired a manly man to work as her live-in housekeeper.

That last one was fiction — and the twist behind a hit sitcom.

Who’s the Boss? was a groundbreaking portrayal of family life that pivoted on gender role-reversal. Tony Danza, fresh from six seasons on Taxi, was ABC’s first choice to play charismatic, uninhibited baseball player–turned–housekeeper and caregiver Tony Micelli. A widower, Tony stayed home to cook, clean and care for two children, while Angela Bower, the cultured, reserved woman of the house, played by Judith Light, was out in the world meeting the demands of her high-level career.

The wholesome series, created by veteran writer-producers Blake Hunter and Martin Cohan, ran on ABC for eight seasons, from 1984 to ’92. Viewed by more than 30 million at its peak, it made the ratings’ top 10 from 1985 to ’89 and scored 10 Primetime Emmy nominations and one award, for lighting direction.

Originally titled “You’re the Boss!” — inspired by the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s and 1970s — the show conjured a new version of the nuclear family. For a start, there were no spouses.

Having left their native Brooklyn for a safer, more genteel environment, Tony and his preteen daughter, Samantha (Alyssa Milano), form a de facto family with divorced Angela, her young son, Jonathan (Danny Pintauro), and her sex-obsessed mother, Mona Robinson (Katherine Helmond), who lived in an apartment in the converted garage.

The show’s core was the sexual tension between Tony and Angela. Viewers tuned in to see how far the housekeeper and the executive would take their mutual attraction, as they segued from flirting to kissing to declarations of love. They were 180 degrees apart in upbringing and formal education, but that just ramped up the comedy, with multiple episodes demonstrating that opposites do attract.

International versions of Who’s the Boss? were made in France, Italy, Germany, Russia and Turkey, among other countries. Though Angela and Tony never married in the original — the series finale left that issue up in the air — their U.K. counterparts did tie the knot.

Other sitcoms, such as My Three Sons, Mr. Belvedere and Charles in Charge, had turned on men handling domestic duties, but Who’s the Boss? was the first to combine that conceit with role-reversal and romantic attraction.

Taped at Sunset Gower Studios in Hollywood, the show was produced in association with Embassy Television. It now streams on Hulu, among other platforms, and can be seen on networks including TV Land, Great American Family and IFC. A sequel — revisiting the family three decades later — is currently in the process of finding a home, with Sony Pictures Television, Norman Lear’s Act III Productions and Farah Films producing.

As this fall marks the premiere’s 40th anniversary, emmy contributor Jane Wollman Rusoff interviewed several cast and creatives, with the exception of Cohan and Helmond, who died in 2010 and 2019, respectively. Judging by participants’ warm reminiscences, working on the show was just as uplifting as watching it.

THE GENESIS

Blake Hunter (cocreator with Martin Cohan): One of us found an article about a woman who solved all her problems by hiring a man to come in to do the housework. It went along with the feminist revolution. We thought, “Wow! That’ll work: a woman corporate maven and a houseman.”

Tony Danza (actor): Columbia offered me three shows: In one, I was a tough New York City detective. In another, I was a daring helicopter pilot. In the third, I was a housekeeper for a woman, her mother and her son. I remember thinking, “I can be funny doing that one.” My manager, the great Jerry Weintraub, said, “No client of mine is playing a housekeeper on TV!” So I had to fight for it.

Judith Light (actress): “Who’s the boss?” was always the question every week. Sometimes it was Mona, sometimes it was Jonathan, sometimes it was Sam. You had this ongoing wonderment about who these people are. “How will they get along and manage their lives? How does it work as a blended family?” All those things made the show magic.

Asaad Kelada (director of 117 episodes): It wasn’t that there was a conflict as to who’s the boss; it was about what makes a boss. Tony was Angela’s employee, so she was the boss that way. But she also deferred to him because he was the male presence in the family, and at times she counted on his guidance and advice. They alternated. It was yin and yang.

Bill Persky (director of the pilot): Tony was essentially the same guy he played on Taxi, but he became a broader character as the series went along. Ken Cinnamon (writer, with wife Karen Wengrod): They came from different worlds. Angela was highly bred with formal education; Tony was a street guy, but he had high emotional intelligence.

Kelada: Tony was much more adept at running the house; Angela wasn’t much of a house-mom. She was a professional woman, and that was the interesting conceit of the series: The roles were reversed. Then there was the attraction between them as a man and woman — how not to cross the line and how to maintain their propriety, because there were little children in the household. Throw into the mix Mona, a free spirit who had to be kept in check every now and then.

Alyssa Milano (actress): What I liked best about Samantha was that she was a tomboy, not a typical sitcom kid. She was a very strong little girl who loved sports and was close to her dad. She showed a different side of a young girl on TV. Having lost her own mom, it was very hard for her to get close to Angela in the beginning. But eventually Angela was a maternal figure for her.

Danny Pintauro (actor): Jonathan was precocious, spoiled, friendly. He was one of those good kids, never doing anything wrong on purpose. So, with the episodes that were more focused on him, it was about Jonathan screwing up.

Cinnamon: Mona was a randy, fun-loving woman, and Angela was much more serious and sort of straight-andnarrow, hard-working. So there was some conflict.

Rhoda Gemignani (actress, Mrs. Rossini): I was the Italian neighborhood figure — the representation of Tony leaving Brooklyn. She was overly protective of Tony and the family. When she saw people that she loved, she pinched their cheeks black and blue.

Hunter: When Tony was packing up his stuff to bring to Connecticut, Mrs. Rossini said, “But you love New York!” He said, “Yeah, but I love my daughter a lot more.”

Karen Wengrod (writer, with husband Ken Cinnamon): You never wanted to make Tony “go Connecticut.” He wasn’t a well-bred WASP. He was a street guy from Brooklyn, and proud of it.

Shana Lane-Block (actress): When I started playing Bonnie [Munson], she was very brainy. Later, when I became Samantha’s best friend, Bonnie operated on her own plane, saying things that either didn’t make sense or came out of left field.

THE ACTORS

Light: Tony and I had so much fun with each other. He taught me so much about comedy, just watching and learning from him. That was part of our dynamic.

Wengrod: Tony Danza is very smart and multitalented, and he expected the most. The jokes needed to be sharp. He had high expectations.

Kelada: Katherine and Judith liked to discuss the scenes. Tony liked to work quickly and had a photographic memory for learning his lines. He liked the scenes to be fresh and spontaneous and not to over-rehearse them.

Persky: It was my idea to cast Judith. I think the network wanted to go for somebody sexier. I had a lot of resistance. I really had to fight for her.

Danza: Judith would be crying with one eye and winking at you with the other.

Gemignani: Judith loved speaking with a Yiddish accent. It was her off-camera shtick. She made us all laugh.

Lane-Block: Judith was my barometer of how to behave and interact. She was like a best friend–aunt. She gave me good advice about life.

Hunter: When Alyssa came in to read, I whispered to Marty, “She’s the one. This is the next Elizabeth Taylor!”

Danza: Alyssa had to tell me so many times, “Tony, I have a father!” because I assumed the role of a father to her. I couldn’t help myself. I used to throw boys out that came to see [her] rehearse.

Persky: We worked with Danny before he went on, and he retained it. We taped a scene and went over it with him a few times. If he was having trouble with something, I’d explain why it was necessary so he wouldn’t just go out there and say the lines.

Hunter: Katherine was a salty babe. She loved to shock people and then say, “Oh, I didn’t mean to say it the way it sounded.” Of course she did.

Milano: When I had a Sweet 16 party, the cast gave me a beautiful diamond-heart necklace. Katherine gave me the first piece of jewelry her husband had given her: two little ruby-and-emerald pinky rings that nest inside each other. She said she gave it to me because she never had a daughter of her own.

Pintauro: I had just turned 6 when I auditioned. That day, Tony and Judith were [tired from auditioning many kids] and by then were paraphrasing their lines. I said, “I’m sorry, could you say the lines as written in the script? Because that’s how I memorized them.”

Milano: I was 10. Before the audition, my mom told me that I would play that cute guy from Taxi’s daughter. I wasn’t too excited when I got it, because it was just for the pilot. We didn’t know if it was going to be picked up.

Light: I also had gone up for another show at ABC. When the higher-ups saw the audition tape of Tony and me, they said, “This is the series she should be doing!”

THE WRITING

Hunter: Marty and I would meet for breakfast and write a scene on the run. I remember one where Jonathan didn’t like what Tony had made for breakfast. He said, “I don’t want scrambled eggs. Got anything else?” and Tony said, “Yeah. Hunger!”

Cinnamon: At the top of each season, the writers would talk as a group, led by Blake and Marty, about where we wanted Tony and Angela to go — the arc of the season. You start with the power struggle. But who was the boss was very fluid. It depended on the story we were telling. It would go back and forth.

Wengrod: Sometimes Tony would cross the line. Instead of just being a housekeeper, he’d take on more of the parental role, which maybe Angela didn’t agree with.

Danza: Angela and I flirted. We really looked like we were in love. But we didn’t have our first kiss till the third year. And she kissed me. We were able to keep the ball in the air. There was some talk about marrying us, but I said no. You didn’t want the tension to be over, because [that would blow it] for syndication. And that’s not what the show was about. It wasn’t about a married couple — it was about that sexual tension.

Hunter: [It’s what] kept us going. The network wanted them to get married, but we didn’t. So finally we got Samantha married, and that shut up the network.

MEMORABLE EPISODES

Danza: In the pilot, Angela is on a date [with her boss]. They drop a plate in the kitchen and are on the floor trying to pick it up. I think she’s being mugged, and I come downstairs with a bat. The guy says, “Who is this?” She says, “My housekeeper.” He goes, “That’s the ugliest woman I’ve ever seen!”

Milano: I started to develop. Back then on TV shows, they tried to keep a kid young-looking by binding their chest. But instead of doing that, they just wrote it into [the episode] “Samantha’s Growing Up.” I was embarrassed, but it was better than being bound. I think we were only allowed to say the word “bra” once. We had to say things like “foundation garment.”

Pintauro: My favorite episode was when I come home with a date, and we’re kissing, and Angela and Tony walk in. I say, “Oh, Heather, here’s your gum,” and take the gum out of my mouth and hand it to her.

Wengrod: There was the episode where Tony cleans his father’s apartment after he dies, and Angela helps him through it. That was always the beauty point between those two characters: There was such a foundation of friendship. They truly loved each other.

Lane-Block: In “Working Girls,” we were matched up with [adults] at their work. Sam gets matched with Tony to do housecleaning, and I get matched up with Angela to work in advertising. When Sam hears I got to go to glamorous places, like the Russian Tea Room, we switch. Now I’m home with Tony cleaning windows, and she goes in with Angela to the ad agency.

Gemignani: There was one episode, “Choose Me,” where Mona and Mrs. Rossini were vying for the same man. Then the guy they have their eye on meets up with Mrs. Rossini and kisses me in the kitchen — and Mona walks in on us.

Kelada: [In the episode “Party Double,” guest star] Frank Sinatra demanded that his scene wouldn’t be shot in front of an audience. So we had to shoot when the stage was closed, except for a few invited guests.

Gemignani: We took, like, a class picture. Frank said to me, “You look just like my ex-wife.” I said, “Which one? Mia Farrow?” He said, “No, Ava Gardner.” He definitely needed to go to the optometrist!

Kelada: We had a wonderful week with Ray Charles [for “Hit the Road, Chad”]. He sat down at the table with his own script in Braille. He probably needed less work with me than anyone else.

THE TONE ON SET (AND OFF)

Kelada: It was a combination of forces: Tony is very outspoken and willful. Judith and Katherine had very rich backgrounds and ways of working. I had to keep things in balance. The chemistry was powerful. It was like capturing lightning in a bottle with the actors’ different ways of working and their different rhythms.

Danza: I taught the kids a cute little tap routine that we’d do to help warm up the audience.

Pintauro: There would be competitions between Judith and Katherine to see who could get ready faster between scenes. They’d run to their dressing rooms. The audience cheered whoever got back first.

Milano: Tony would do current events every Thursday. He’d open the paper and read about what was going on in the world. It was incredible to discuss topics that were bigger than making a TV show.

Pintauro: Tony would tell the audience the same joke every Friday. Alyssa and I would sometimes sit on the set behind him and mouth it. The audience loved that.

Danza: We had a party every Friday night on the set, or we’d run over to my brother’s restaurant, Matty’s, on Melrose [Avenue] that had a piano player. It would be like New York.

Wengrod: Sometimes after taping, Tony would invite us to his house, and we’d play Pictionary.

Lane-Block: Alyssa and I would hang out. One time we went to [shopping district] Westwood Village. It was surreal, because there were people shouting, “Samantha! Samantha!” and wanting to talk to her. It felt so strange.

A LONG-RUNNING HIT

Wengrod: The theme was very progressive and ahead of its time: a man working for a woman. It had so much substance. Even though it was an 8 o’clock family sitcom, the jokes came from character; they weren’t jokes for a cheap laugh. The casting was brilliant.

Cinnamon: It was something we’d never seen before: a couch sitcom about a divorced woman who ran her own business, who had a promiscuous mother and who hired a man to do the housework and help raise her kid. It had a spin that was enough to make it relatable but also unique.

Kelada: The audience was invested in that household. They wanted to know what was going to happen with the people. I believe they knew that each character really loved and protected each other.

Danza: People kept watching it, first of all, because of the writing, which ties into the fact that it was a groundbreaking show. It had role reversal. The sexual tension had a lot to do with [the success of] it. And I think it was funny.

Gemignani: The magic was Tony. The magic was the cast. The magic was the writing. The magic was the premise. It just blended.

Pintauro: We had a great run. We could have had another season, but they made the decision to end it on a high note rather than have a season that maybe wasn’t that great. I don’t know the whole story. But we were ready and prepared for it to end.

Milano: I remember being very sad. I cried and cried and cried during that last taping. But I was also excited to see what the future held for me. I was very blessed and lucky.

This article originally appears in emmy magazine, issue #9 2024, under the title "Showing TV Who's Boss."