You take the good, you take the bad, you take ‘em both and there you have the Facts of Life. This was a staple growing up. It was a foreign idea to me, the story of a bunch of girls in an all-girls school with uniforms and house mothers. Very strange to this public school kid.
The premise actually changed after the first year of the show. The producers decided to focus on four of the boarding school girls rather than a plethora, hoping to cash in on that 80s staple of afterschool special-type episodes. Tough girl on scholarship, Jo, was introduced, got the girls in trouble which resulted in the school punishing them by making them bunk together as well as help Mrs. Garrett in the cafeteria.
By doing that though, we lost Molly Ringwald as a character. I heard she did all right for herself after that 
Facts of Life ran for nine seasons and saw our core four girls: Blair the blue-blooded snobby socialite, Tootie, the one with the weird name, Natalie, the effervescent, bubbly chubby girl, and Jo, the tough chick from the Bronx face a lot of issues such as pregnancy, hurricanes, reading disorders, alcoholism, censorship, and even teenage prostitution!
They all eventually graduated from Eastland Academy and went on to continue living with Mrs> garrett in her gourmet shop in the Peekskills until Mrs. G got hitched, and Frau Blucher - I mean Chloris Leachman joined the cast.
I feel like I grew up with this show. Natalie was always my favourite character, but I like Jo and her no-nonsense, hard knock approach to life, and how she often took Blair down a peg or two. Tootie was fun, and always getting into scrapes. The show was your typical sitcom with silly situations that would never happen IRL but FoL made them all seem believable. Or maybe I’m just looking back with my rosey glasses and the show was really dreck. But dreck doesn’t usually make it nine seasons (not a word from you Survivor haters out there.)
Bit O’Trivia: Kim Fields was only nine years old when she started playing Tootie, who was supposed to be twelve. In an effort to make her appear taller (and older) her character was always in roller skates for the first year of the show. - from the IMDb
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