One Day at a Time

This is one of my all-time favorites except for the last couple of seasons. The early years were great, funny, insightful, and pretty original. Ann dealt with some pretty heavy problems with her kids, found work she liked, and became an old pro at the dating game. It was neat to watch the character mature along with her daughters.

However, like a lot of shows with children/teenagers, they had to come up with a way to keep things going after the kids had grown too old for the story lines. In this case, they brought in a little boy with a pretty contrived plot line to be the new "son". It didn't work well.

I use to watch this when it was on TV. Recently its back on LOGO so I have been catching up on it. I forgot had bad Bonnie Franklin was in this show! Valerie Bertinelli was the reason I watched this show back when it was on she is still good in this show. They should have replaced the Bonnie Franklin with someone else.

This show was a revolutionary in the women's movement. Bonnie Franklin played red head divorcée and mother of two teenage daughters who moves from Loganport, Indiana to the big city of Indianapolis. Her daughters are played by the wonderful, Valerie Bertinelli, and Mackenzie Phillips. They played Barbara and Julie. Remember Schneider who frequented the apartment as the building handyman. Nan Fabray who played Ann's mother. I loved Richard Masur as Ann's first boyfriend after her divorce. I thought he should have stayed on but it wouldn't work if Ann remarried so soon after the divorce papers were inked. I remember Shelley Fabares on the show as one of her co-workers as well as Mary Louise Wilson as a cocktail waitress neighbor. It was one of the few shows that I could recall was set in Indianapolis. I thought the show was well-written most of the time and the acting was worthy of the Emmys it received. They don't make shows like this. I remember the apartment layout most of all. Despite Phillips' substance problems, Valerie was truly a star in the making. The show grew and evolved and was well-loved by its audience.

How can a four year old remember the pilot episode of a show? I don't know, but I do. Groundbreaking at the time, it actually featured a divorced mother with her two kids. Very topical, and sedate by today's standards, this show was a huge hit. Of all the people on this show who would have thought Valerie Bertenelli would have the biggest career? And who knew McKenzie Phillips was on heroin? Totally watched during the seventies but everyone pretty much was over it by the early eighties. Still one of the coolest shows of the seventies.

First off, i want to correct a previous poster who said that Valerie Bertinelli went on to marry the lead singer from Bon Jovi---she didn't marry Jon Bon Jovi, she married Eddie Van Halen, of the group Van Halen. They were married for a really long time, and i think they recently got divorced. They have one son together. Anyway....

I loved this show as a teenager. And i was forbidden to watch it when it started, so i had to sneak it when i was 13, with the volume way down low in my parent's bedroom, constantly watching the doorway to make sure mom or dad didn't come in. I loved this show. It did get a little old once everybody grew up, but i still watched it. Anybody out there remember when the show shifted focus to a house that Barbara and her husband shared with another couple? Was that couple Julie and her husband? I think this may have been the last season of the show.~~Linda