Who's the Boss?: Living Dolls

Guess which one's a vain tease and which
one's the naive, trusting girl from Idaho.

Who's the Boss?: Living Dolls
ABC
March 28, 1989
Sitcom
DVD
C+

Yet another back-door pilot about modeling, although this one did become a regular series called, yes, Living Dolls.  (It ran for twelve episodes.)  This isn't bad but it certainly wouldn't have made me watch LD.  The characters are cliches, although there are some nice moments between the two leads, and Sam isn't shoehorned into the plot quite as badly as Angela on the "Charmed Lives" episode.

Michael Learned appears as Trish Baldwin, a much nicer college friend of Angela's than the Trish we met in Season One.  (The ten-year age difference between Light and Learned is lampshaded a bit when it turns out that each claims to be ten years younger than the other.)  This Trish runs a teen-modeling agency, and one of her models is street-smart Charlie Briscoe, played by Leah Remini.  Charlie turns out to be an old Brooklyn friend of Sam's, who's at the agency doing a story for the school paper.  OK, not terribly plausible, but still better than all we're expected to believe in "Charmed Lives."

Bobby Brett, who plays Ike Calaboni had previously appeared as Gene.  It looks like going to series meant heavy recasting, but I like Vivica A. Fox (later of the daytime soap Generations), who was replaced by Halle Berry.  Ross Brown wrote this and the other episode about Charlie, while director Sgueglia had recently started working for Roseanne.