Honestly, if you looked at the call sheet for a new sitcom in 1986 and saw Ellen Burstyn, Elaine Stritch, and a young Megan Mullally, you’d assume you were looking at a multi-season juggernaut. It had everything. An Oscar winner. A Broadway legend. A future sitcom icon. Yet, The Ellen Burstyn Show is now mostly a trivia answer for late-night TV nerds or people who spend too much time on obscure Wikipedia deep dives.
It was supposed to be ABC’s big Saturday night play. Instead, it became a cautionary tale about bad scheduling and the weird, fickle nature of 80s television audiences.
What Really Happened With The Ellen Burstyn Show?
The premise was pretty standard for the era, but it had a bit more "prestige" flavor than your average family sitcom. Burstyn played Ellen Brewer, a successful Baltimore college professor and author. She’s the glue holding together a chaotic multi-generational household. You had her sassy, overbearing mother Sydney (played by the incomparable Elaine Stritch), her recently divorced daughter Molly (Megan Mullally), and her five-year-old grandson, Nick.
🔗 Read more: Where Can I Watch Pitbulls and Parolees: The 2026 Streaming Guide
Basically, it was The Golden Girls meets One Day at a Time, but with a drier, more intellectual wit.
The show premiered on September 20, 1986. If you weren't there, it's hard to explain how much pressure was on this block of television. ABC had paired it with Life with Lucy, the disastrous final comeback attempt by Lucille Ball. The idea was to create a "Queens of Comedy" night.
It didn't work. At all.
The "Lucy" Effect and the Saturday Night Death Slot
You can’t talk about The Ellen Burstyn Show without talking about the carnage that was Life with Lucy. When Lucy’s show tanked—and it tanked hard—it took everything else down with it. Burstyn’s show was the lead-out, meaning it inherited a fleeing audience.
While the critics actually liked Burstyn's performance, calling her "warm" and "genuine," they weren't as kind to the writing. It felt a bit like a "chuckle" show in an era that wanted "belly laughs." The tone wavered. One minute, Ellen is breaking the fourth wall and talking to the camera like a gentle PBS host; the next, Elaine Stritch is doing broad, vampy grandma comedy that felt like it belonged in a different series entirely.
- Competition: It was aired directly against NBC's powerhouse lineup of 227 and The Golden Girls.
- The Ratings: By the time the eighth episode aired in November 1986, the network had seen enough.
- The Burn-off: ABC yanked it from the schedule, only to "burn off" the remaining five episodes in the summer of 1987.
A Cast That Was Simply Too Good to Fail (But Did)
Looking back, the most shocking thing about The Ellen Burstyn Show is the sheer level of talent involved. It’s rare to see this much "acting capital" in a half-hour sitcom that only lasted thirteen episodes.
Ellen Burstyn (Ellen Brewer)
By 1986, Burstyn was already a legend. She had the Oscar for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and a Tony for Same Time, Next Year. She brought a grounded, professorial energy to the role. Some critics argued she was actually too good—that her naturalistic style made the sitcom tropes feel forced. She wasn't a "joke-machine" like Roseanne or Bea Arthur; she was a dramatic actress trying to find the rhythm of a live studio audience.
👉 See also: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Wiki: Why the New Lore Actually Works
Elaine Stritch (Sydney Brewer)
If anyone was having fun, it was Stritch. Playing the sarcastic, martini-dry mother, she provided the sharp edges the show desperately needed. Honestly, a spin-off just about Sydney Brewer probably would have lasted five years. Her chemistry with Burstyn was prickly and real, reflecting the complicated mother-daughter dynamics that would later become a staple of "prestige" TV.
Megan Mullally (Molly Brewer Ross)
This is the "before they were famous" gold mine. Long before she was Karen Walker on Will & Grace, Mullally was playing the earnest, slightly overwhelmed daughter. You can see flashes of her comedic timing, but the role was much more constrained than the wild characters she'd eventually become known for.
Why It Didn't Stick
The show suffered from a bit of an identity crisis. Was it a sophisticated look at three generations of women? Or was it a broad comedy about a dog having puppies (the plot of the pilot)?
By trying to be both, it satisfied neither. The 1980s sitcom landscape was dominated by very specific "vibes." You had the high-energy slapstick of Cheers or the cozy, aspirational warmth of The Cosby Show. The Ellen Burstyn Show felt a bit too "theatre-kid" for the average Saturday night viewer.
Also, we have to talk about the theme song. "Nothing in the World Like Love," performed by Rita Coolidge. It was... fine. But in an era of iconic earworms, it just sort of drifted into the background.
Lessons from the 1986 TV Graveyard
What can we actually learn from the failure of The Ellen Burstyn Show? Mostly that talent isn't a shield against bad timing.
- Lead-ins are everything. Even a great show can't survive if the 30 minutes preceding it are a literal train wreck.
- Find the "Funny" early. The show struggled to decide if it wanted to be a dramedy or a gag-fest. In the mid-80s, the "dramedy" hadn't really been perfected yet.
- Respect the competition. You don't put a quiet, thoughtful family show up against The Golden Girls at the height of their powers. That's just a suicide mission.
If you’re a fan of television history, it’s worth tracking down the few episodes that have surfaced on YouTube. It’s a fascinating glimpse into a transitional period of TV where "movie stars" were first starting to experiment with the small screen—long before it was the prestigious thing to do.
To truly understand why some shows vanish, you have to look at the landscape they were born into. The Ellen Burstyn Show wasn't a "bad" show; it was just a quiet one in a very loud room.
✨ Don't miss: Dale Hawkins Susie Q: What Most People Get Wrong About the Song That Built Rock and Roll
How to Explore This Era Further
If you want to see what else was "failing" during this specific window of TV history, look up the 1986-1987 ABC lineup. You’ll find titles like Heart of the City and Sidekicks—shows that tried to innovate but were ultimately crushed by the NBC "Must See TV" juggernaut. Comparing the pilot of the Burstyn show to something like The Golden Girls reveals a lot about how pacing and joke-density evolved during that decade.
Search for archival clips of Elaine Stritch’s scenes specifically; her performance remains the most "modern" feeling part of the whole experiment. You'll quickly see why she remained a force in the industry for decades after this show became a footnote.
Actionable Insight: If you're interested in the evolution of the "prestige sitcom," watch the pilot of The Ellen Burstyn Show and compare it to the first season of Murphy Brown (1988). You can see the DNA of the "smart woman lead" sitcom being refined in real-time between those two years.