What might have been. Suzanne Somers was ready to do a Three’s Company reboot, but she couldn’t get all the relevant parties on board with her idea.
“I had suggested a show where you would imagine that Chrissy Snow and Jack Tripper eventually got married and they had a child,” the Dancing With the Stars alum, 75, said during the Tuesday, April 26, episode of the “Behind the Velvet Rope” podcast. Somers played Chrissy on the beloved sitcom, while the late John Ritter played her roommate Jack.
The 8 Simple Rules alum died in 2003 at age 54, but his former costar had a solution for how a reboot could work without him. Somers thought John’s eldest son, Jason Ritter, could play Chrissy and Jack’s son, while John would appear in digital form.
“I had suggested this to Jason’s people and that the show would be me and Jason, but that John would appear as a hologram because it’d be like he was back and alive,” she explained on Tuesday. “But Jason doesn’t want to do anything reminiscent of what his father did.”
Three’s Company aired for eight seasons on ABC from 1977 to 1984. The series followed Chrissy and her roommate Janet (Joyce DeWitt) after they agreed to let Jack move in with them despite their landlord’s prohibition on mixed-gender unmarried people living together.
Somers hasn’t done a sitcom since Step by Step ended in 1998, but she explained that a Three’s Company reboot would entice her back to the small screen. “That was the last time I got kinda turned on by thinking about doing a series again,” the California native explained.
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Without Jason, however, she wouldn’t consider it. “The marketing is so much better. Suzanne Somers and John Ritter’s son, Jason,” she said of the Parenthood alum, 42. “And I guess that’s what he didn’t want, but that’s a marketer’s dream. Suzanne Somers and Fred Schmoe is not a marketer’s dream, you know what I mean?”
When Somers competed on season 20 of DWTS in 2015, she dedicated one of her performances to John. She and her partner, Tony Dovolani, recreated the Three’s Company set, and the actress wore pigtails in homage to Chrissy’s signature look.
“This one’s for you John,” she said in a pre-taped package, adding that she and her late costar had the kind of screen chemistry that only happens once in a lifetime. “It’s the dance that Chrissy and John never got to have.”
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