1990-91
DAD: Tom Nash (Robert Urich) / Widower
DAD’S JOB: Columnist/Ex-TV Newsman
KIDS: Rachel Nash (Chay Lentin) (14), Danny Nash (Johnny Galecki) (12)
WHERE’S MOM?: Dead
STAND-IN “MOM”: Lillian Abernathy (Carol Kane) / Research assistant
TV Formula: when your wife dies, quit your Peter Jennings-style day job, move to Walton’s Mountain, and write “slice of life” articles. This show was trotted out for the fall season in 1990, then yanked and used for schedule-plugs the following spring.
This was NBC’s blurb for the show: Robert Urich (“Spenser for Hire”) returns to series television in the new NBC comedy “American Dreamer,” in which he stars as a widower who gives up his career as a TV foreign correspondent to raise his two children and write a newspaper column drawn from the perspective of his past and present life. Joining him in the series are Margaret Welsh as waitress Holly Baker; Johnny Galecki as his son, Danny; Jeffrey Tambor as his editor, Joe Baines; Chay Lentin as his daughter, Rachel; and Carol Kane as his research assistant, Lillian Abernathy.
Note: this show was the beginning of the Robert Urich TV Single Dad Hegemony… read on as Mr. U’s tries at single parenthood haunt the 90’s…