IT’S no surprise that the kids who made millions of kids and adults laugh for years and years – Gary Coleman, Dana Plato, and Todd Bridges – on the hugely popular “Diff’rent Storkes” had very diff’rent lives than the happy ones they portrayed. In fact, the word “hellish” is the first one that comes to mind.
And although on “Diff’rent Strokes,” Arnold, Willis and Kimberly lived lives of luxury provided by their TV dad, in real life, they were the ones who worked like little slaves to provide lives of luxury for their dads and moms.
Or that’s the way it’s portrayed, at any rate, on a quite-good NBC TV movie about the series, “Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of Diff’rent Strokes,” Monday night, a warts-and-nothing-but-warts look at what those kids’ lives were like during the eight seasons the show was on the air. And worse, it also chronicles the nightmare turns all of their lives took once the show was killed off.
Their stories are so horrible, that if they weren’t real, you’d never believe them as pure drama.
In reality, little Kimberly (Plato) overdosed and possibly killed herself after a downward spiral that included being raised by a horrific mother, the loss of custody of her own baby as a young adult, an addiction to drugs, a stint working at a Las Vegas dry cleaner, posing for “Playboy,” eviction from her apartment, robbing a video store at gun point and being bailed out by Wayne Newton, who’d never even met her.
She overdosed and was dead by the age of 34, after a humiliating on-air interview with Howard Stern.
Bridges, who at the height of his fame was constantly being harassed by the LAPD, also spiraled into hell after the show ended, becoming a drug addict who was charged (and acquitted) of attempted murder with a gun, and later another mysterious stabbing incident.
He finally pulled himself very together and is a working actor who last season appeared on “Skating With Celebrities.”
Then there’s Coleman – who tragically went from super-super star to a young man estranged from his close-knit parents, suing them for withholding millions he’d earned.
The movie is really insightful, and the growing kids, played by a succession of young actors (Coleman: Bobb’e J. Thompson, Robertt Bailey, Alon Williams; Bridges: Brennan Gademans, Shendrack Anderson; Plato: Jessica King, Britt Irvin), do bang-up jobs. There’s also a great turn by Verda Bridges, Bridges’ sister, playing their mother.
Bridges and Coleman appear during breaks in the movie to talk about what they went through. Coleman, the precocious kid, sounds downright brilliant as a fine, grown-up man.
“They say that you get chewed up and spit out – well, I’m not dead,” he says, “But I’m well chewed.” This guy should be writing movies – if not starring in them.
Nobody ever said TV was real life (until recently that is), but, trust me, some old sitcoms were just not filled with, er, happy days.
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“Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of Diff’rent Strokes”
[***] (Three stars)
Monday night at 8 on Ch. 4
