On what “Home Improvement” meant to her career and becoming part of the cast:
Debbe Dunning: I was working on all sorts of commercials and little bits of shows here and there. When I came in the first year, I came in as Kiki Van Fursterwallenscheinlaw. Remember that?
I was blessed enough to be asked back after Pamela decided to go, and I realized I had a family. I had a place where people tuned in.
It’s a crazy thing when you work so hard and all of a sudden you’re like, now you have a name. You’ve actually made a name for yourself doing everything that you love.
I loved showing up. I loved the fact that my dressing room became a nursery when I had a kid. This show was so good for me.
We had antics. We were a family. When you work with somebody year after year, five days a week, you become like family. Sometimes we’d argue. Sometimes we’d be a little pissy. But at the end of the day, we all really, really loved our job.
I feel like you guys come to our table and say, “This was one of the best parts of our childhood, because this is when our families would meet at dinner on a Tuesday or Wednesday night.” It really left an imprint.
So I feel very blessed to have been part of this show. And thank you guys for not only showing up today, but for all your nice comments. I was here two years ago and I was like, “Oh, I’m definitely coming back.”
You guys are just amazing.
On joining “Home Improvement” at the last minute and when she realized the show could become a hit:
Patricia Richardson: I was a last-minute replacement for Frances Fisher, who’s a friend of mine now and a wonderful actress.
[Richardson explains that Fisher’s performance simply wasn’t the tone the producers ultimately wanted for Jill Taylor.]
It wasn’t that she was bad. It was that, the way the show is written, if you play the wife as a victim, they were worried because [Tim’s character] was seeming abusive.
I’d already been signed with Disney for something that was supposed to happen in September. I had just given birth to twins three months before this. I was not interested in working then.
But they called me on a Wednesday and said, “We want you to start tomorrow. You’ll rehearse Thursday and Friday, maybe Saturday. Monday we’ll do cameras. Tuesday we shoot the show.”
I hadn’t worked in a year because I was pregnant, in bed, and then had two kids with colic.
Richard Karn: Tell them the show that you were supposed to do.
Richardson: The show I was supposed to do, ironically, was called “Home Movies,” and it was by the people who wrote “The Wonder Years.”
It was supposed to be a dramedy about a young husband and wife with a very young child, which was really what I was interested in doing. I’d already done three sitcoms that failed.
[Richardson explains that she and her then-husband, actor Ray Baker, had been through enough pilots to know that big studio-audience reactions did not guarantee a pickup.]
So when we did the pilot, the laughs were like -
Richard Karn: Eleven seconds. Thirteen seconds.
Richardson: They didn’t know who we were. They hadn’t seen the show yet, so they were laughing in the moment without having any context.
I’m sitting there waiting through these laughs - waiting, waiting, waiting - and thinking, “God, we have done so many pilots.” I knew they always stack the audience with your friends, so I thought the reason we were getting these ridiculous laughs was because it was full of friends.
I was like, “These people are nuts.” I almost wanted to go, “Calm down, calm down. We’re trying to do a show.”
When it was over, I went upstairs and my husband was there. I still thought I would do the show, it would fail, and I could go home and be with my babies.
There had been other shows with a stand-up and a family that had bombed, so I just thought, whatever.
But the script was good.
And even when something is going really well, that’s not a guarantee. In Hollywood, you can do a brilliant sitcom and not get picked up.
Then Ray said, “Well, welcome to the show you’re going to be doing for the next seven years.”
And I was like, “What? That’s not my plan.”
And he said, “It is so good.”
I was stunned. I just didn’t know.
[Richardson says her confidence grew when ABC gave “Home Improvement” a strong time slot next to “Roseanne.”]
And we were up against “Seinfeld.”
And we won. We beat “Seinfeld.”
However, they moved “Seinfeld” to Thursday night, and that became Must See TV. And it became, well, “‘Seinfeld’ is the smart show, and ‘Home Improvement’ is the show for children and their parents.”
Which is a good thing, because now we are really rewatching it, and it is such a safe show. It’s a show that you don’t have to worry about. And it’s also giving a really great lesson.
I feel like you guys have learned something from it and been affected in some way by it, and mostly it’s all been positive.
So when you ask when I knew it was going to be a hit... I felt like it was a hit when I started. I really did.
We were always People’s Choice. Every time we went to an awards thing, we won.
And I really didn’t watch it because I was working so hard. You work a full week, and then coming home and actually sitting there watching the show that you’re on... we would just tape it.
We’d be working when it aired.
