Season 1 Overview

After the success of the Fame movie in 1980 MGM  taxed Gerald Isenberg (Executive Producer), Stan Rogow (Producer) and Christopher Gore (writer & Creator) with developing a pilot episode for television.

Filming took place on location in New York in December 1980.  Debbie Allen, Lee Curreri, Albert Hague and Gene Anthony Ray reprised their roles from the movie.

Irene Cara had been offered to recreate the role of Coco from the movie but as her solo music career was taking off she decided to decline the role and Erica Gimpel took over the part. Erica was a student of the real life school for the arts and missed a number of the first season episodes as she returned to New York in order to graduate from the school.

Fred Silverman, the then head of NBC liked the pilot enough to commission a series if the right Executive Producer could be found and William Blinn was one of people he had in mind. When Blinn accepted the role and brought Mel Swope in as producer the network requested that the Pilot be re-edited to be more accessible by the audience. New footage was filmed and about 75% of the original was kept.

Some 8th months went by before the series went into production. The majority of the cast actually came from New York, however after the pilot, the production of the series moved to MGM studios (sound stages 26 & 28) in Culver City, Los Angeles. Exterior shots of the school were filmed at The Bradbury Building which is located at 304 South Broadway (3rd and Broadway) in Downtown Los Angeles.

Art Director Ira Diamond created the main set of the lobby, office, teacher’s lounge, dance room, cafeteria and classrooms on soundstage 26.  After the pilot 10 additional episodes were to be produced and the series was sold to NBC television. Who would request a couple more episodes, after judging audience reaction  and then just when the cast and crew thought the season was ending with "The Crazies", 3 more episodes were requested bringing the total to 16 episodes in the first season. 

The first episode aired on American TV on NBC at 8.00pm on 7th January 1982 and in the U.K on the BBC at 8.10pm on 17th June 1982. 

The character of Garcy didn’t work in the pilot and so was dropped, with the new character of Danny Amatullo created instead. Some of the early scripts had already been written and feature Garcy instead of Danny.

In the Pilot, Fran Drescher as Rhonda had a bigger role but the scenes were cut and the character dropped, although William Blinn seriously considered keeping the character on the show.

The new character of Julie was created and the original idea was that she would be a dancer. However, when the producers discovered that Lori Singer was a trained cellist they decided to change the character to a musician instead.

It was decided that the character of Montgomery should no longer be gay as the producers and writers felt they couldn’t make any kind of story out of that. Sadly this meant Montgomery was the least realised Character on the show. Although he was fairly popular it was decided not to renew PR's contract for the second season and the Character of Montgomery was written out of the show, with no explanation of what happened to him. 

Guest actor Michael Thoma played drama teacher Greg Crandall during the first season. Part way through the season Michael

Suffered a minor heart attack and while he was in hospital, the doctors discovered that he was suffering from cancer.  Michael

Continued to work on the show while undergoing treatment but had to be written out from a number of episodes towards the end of the season. It soon became clear that his cancer was terminal and Michael wouldn't be able to work on the second season.

An episode, "A Special Place" was written, which became the season finale and Michael returned to the show to film his final

scenes. The "Starmaker Tribute" was the cast and crew saying their goodbyes to him. Many of the cast didn't know until that day that anything was wrong. Michael passed away on September 3rd 1982, aged 56.  

Debbie Allen not only appeared on screen as Lydia but also became the shows choreographer.  She cast and was in charge of the show’s dancers.  Many of the directors on the show were not familiar with music and dance, so Debbie often took on the role of directing the musical numbers too.

Each episode took 7 shooting days to make, with the musical numbers filmed on the last 2 days of each shoot.  

The series faired okay in America but was up against “Magnum PI” so never won its time slot. However, it did do enough to secure a second season. In the U.K. the show became an instant hit, attracting up to 11 million viewers per episode. Its Thursday night time slot following the hugely popular chart music show “Top of the Pops” was the ideal place to take advantage of a readymade audience.

An album “The Kids From Fame” was released in March 1982 in the U.S. to little success. however the popularity of the series in the U.K and Europe led to the album being a  huge seller. It spent a total of  46 weeks on the U.K. charts, with 12 of those weeks at number 1. 

“Hi Fidelity” and “Starmaker” were released as singles and reached number 5 and 3 on the U.K. singles chart. The records sold so well that a 2nd album was quickly released, “The Kids from Fame Again”  which  was also hugely successful.

Fame Mania had hit and the cast were brought over to the U.K. during their Christmas break, from filming season 2, to perform a number of U.K. sell out concerts in December 1982 and January 1983.  

Many forms of merchandise, Including books, posters, clothing and magazines were quickly released to tie into the show and the cast were all over the U.K. press.

The 1st season of “Fame” received 12 nominations at the 1982 Emmy Awards, of which it proudly won  5. It was also nominated for and won 2 Golden Globe Awards in 1982. (See the Trivia - Awards section for a Full List of Award nominations).