Ronnie grows a beard to hide the scars from the stove burner and eventually you can’t see it anymore at all. Before, he had a really lame mustache, but he looked great with the beard.
Ronnie was always my favorite character on the show. It was ingenious the way they slowly had him rise to significance, from a background character to a key player in the Strike Team hustles…and yet, for the first three or four seasons, he hardly has any lines. He’s always there, in the background, but he rarely says anything. When I used to watch that show with my friends, we would always take bets on whether Ronnie was going to say anything in any given episode.
The Shield was amazing. I really cannot get into The Wire at all and I find it to be way too high-handed, complicated, and, quite simply, boring. I need a show with a real balance of action and story, and The Shield fits that bill perfectly.
Speaking just for myself here…oh, yeah!
(on edit I realized this is so far away from the original thought that you may have forgotten he was referencing “Barney Miller”)
I didn’t specify anything in the OP, but I guess it’s better to limit this to American TV. The rest of the world is much uglier.
Not a TV series, but a series of film shorts.
Ah, What’s Happening! Yes, it makes this list.
I think Kitty started as a hottie, and grew out of it. Was James Arness himself supposed to be a manhottie? But yeah, I guess it qualifies.
As far as Cheers – no, Diane and Sam both were meant to be eye candy. Plus all the chicks Sam was bangin’. They do get some points for Carla and Nick, though – the grimmest married couple ever on a sitcom.
I’ve never seen this show. You yourself seem ambivalent about whether some of the characters might be considered eye candy. Anyone else want to pitch in on whether The Shield should be on the list?
The funny thing about LaWanda Page (Aunt Esther on Sanford & Son) was that she was completely the opposite of her character on the show. LaWanda started out as an exotic dancer, dubbed “The Bronze Goddess of Fire” because she used fire stage magic tricks in her act (lighting cigarettes with her finger, etc). She later recorded the same sort of “blue” party albums as Redd Foxx (who was instrumental in casting her as Esther on the show), including one called “Mutha” Is Only Half a Word!.
She sounds like someone who’d have been fun as hell to hang out with.
James Arness and Amanda Blake were both attractive actors when Gunsmoke began in 1956. The photo linked to in an earlier post appears to be from the early 1970s.
And I forgot Raj’s teacher, who was also an occasional “Ugly” substitute for Aunt Esther on the occasion Sanford and Son episode, and Rob, the restaurant owner.
He was never my cup of tea (I preferred Epstein, myself), but Travolta was enough of a hottie-phenomenon to offset the averageness of the rest of the cast.
And I thought Raj was cute (and Dwayne also) on What’s Happening. Maybe not quite cute enough to offset Shirley, but that’s kind of hard to quantify.
