Good Morning, Miss Bliss debuted on the Disney Channel in 1988, starring Disney legend Hayley Mills as a beloved junior high teacher. It was supposed to be a nostalgic comeback vehicle for the Pollyanna star — a family sitcom that would bring parents and kids together. Instead, it flopped after 13 episodes. But NBC owned the rights. And when they looked back at the footage, they realized the kids — Zack, Screech, and Lisa Turtle — were the ones people actually wanted to watch. So they scrapped the teacher, moved the show to California, added Kelly, Slater, and Jessie, and turned it into Saved by the Bell — one of the biggest shows of the 1990s.
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00:00 --> 11:49 Back in the '90s, if you ever had the kind of day where you wake up in the morning and the alarm gave off a warning and you thought you would never make it on time, you knew that it would be alright because after school you would be able to watch the kids of Bayside High on Saved by the Bell. It was a cultural moment, arguably the biggest live-action kids show on TV at the time. It was the cornerstone of the NBC Saturday morning block, and it showed after school in many markets instead syndication, but it all started as a Disney show, a failed comeback vehicle for a Disney legend who got her child star start in the 1960s. And it was part of a groundbreaking deal for cable television, and it would air on the Disney Channel. So how did this failed Disney show get its second wind to become a success and go on to change how even Disney would approach every Disney Channel sitcom after it? Hey, this is Synergy Loves Company, where we explore how Disney connects to everything. I'm Eric, and today we're taking a look at Good Morning, Miss Bliss, that failed Disney Channel show that got torn apart and turned into Saved by the Bell, one of the biggest shows of the 1990s. And if you watched the last 2 videos, we've actually been taking a look at Disney Channel shows like The Mickey Mouse Club and Kids Incorporated, and those shows had a success on Disney Channel, but like when many of the stars left the show, they became even bigger. Good Morning, Miss Bliss kind of fits in with these two. It's definitely of this era, but this time the plan kind of completely backfired, and then somehow it actually worked out anyway, just not for Disney. The whole show got more popular when it left the Disney Channel. I guess kind of like those stars who left Mickey Mouse Club and Kids Incorporated and, and it got more popular. But let's get back there to see how it all played out. In 1987, NBC president Brandon Tartikoff has an idea that he just can't let go. He wants a show about his childhood teacher, a woman named Miss Bliss, who apparently left that much of a mark on him growing up. I mean, it kind of sounds like a very specific concept. Like one that was meant for a single-person audience. But anyway, he gives that idea to a producer named Peter Engel and tells him to build a series around her. Go make that show about my favorite teacher. And Peter Engel does it. He gets some kids to play students and tries to get Sandy Duncan to play Miss Bliss, but can't get her. So he settles for Hayley Mills. And grown-ups in the '80s would definitely remember her from those Disney movies she did back in the '60s. So that would work in a pinch. NBC actually makes a pilot for this show in 1987, and NBC passes on it. Like, they made the show and then they, they didn't want it. Tartikoff doesn't want to burn a full season of primetime on this concept, the one that he made about his favorite teacher. Anyway, instead of killing the idea, he takes a gamble on the budding cable industry, and he sells it to the Disney Channel. Shopping it to Disney Channel might have had something to do to do with Hayley Mills. She's got those deep ties to Disney and later would be named a Disney Legend. So NBC is going to produce the show and Disney Channel will air it, and that is actually groundbreaking. It's a groundbreaking deal in the late 1980s. It's the first time a major broadcast network ever made a show specifically for a cable network. That kind of thing happens all the time now, but it was unheard of in 1988. And at the time, Disney Channel was premium cable network. You had to pay extra for it. It had about 4 million homes subscribed back then. NBC, on the other hand, was reaching 88 million homes on any given night. A major broadcast network with that many homes it was serving producing a show for a little old Disney Channel, you know, that didn't happen. Disney Channel could take that deal and get some more legitimacy on cable, but then, you know, NBC could test out this brand new kind of distribution deal that nobody else in the business was doing yet. And with that arrangement comes some real stakes attached. Disney orders 13 episodes to start for the first season, but they add in the contract that if the show connects with viewers, they could extend it to 77 more episodes after that. That's kind of an enormous vote of confidence for this new show in this new deal that could set the series up for syndication and give it years and years of life to come. NBC gives Disney Channel a fresh pilot. The kids from the original NBC pilot included Brian Austin Green, who would later blow up on Beverly Hills, 90210, and Jaleel White, who we know as Steve Urkel on Family Matters. But they get scrapped and we get a whole new student cast for the Disney Channel version of the show. And this is where it starts to look more like what we know as Saved by the Bell. Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Lark Voorhies, and Dustin Diamond are all students in Miss Bliss's At this point too, NBC even briefly considers ditching Hayley Mills as Miss Bliss. Even though Disney is airing the show, NBC never actually gives up ownership of it. NBC Productions holds on to the rights for the entire time. But Disney did get to help steer the ship, and they would definitely want to keep Hayley Mills as Miss Bliss. They could totally sell that to the Disney Channel subscriber base. Maybe tee the show up after airing Pollyanna. Or The Parent Trap, because Hayley Mills— I've been saying her name a whole bunch. So let's talk a little bit about Disney legend Hayley Mills, Miss Bliss herself. First off, you should know that she didn't just show up out of nowhere and become famous on her own. Her dad is Sir John Mills, a big name in British acting for decades. He starred in Disney's Swiss Family Robinson and would also go on to be named a Disney Legend. And her mom, Mary Haley Bell, was a successful playwright. So Haley Mills had famous parents before she had a single famous role of her own. She was pretty much a nepo baby, but she caught the eye of Walt Disney. In 1960, she stars as Pollyanna in Pollyanna, and she won the Academy Juvenile Award for her performance. And that role kicks off an entire era of Disney family films. If you grew up in the 1960s, there's a big chance Haley Mills is one one of the first movie stars you ever knew and loved. She played twins in The Parent Trap. She's the lead in In Search of Castaways, Summer Magic, The Moonspinners. And in 1965, she stars in her final Disney film, That Darn Cat. She's in that whole run of early '60s Disney movies that helped build the family film formula that Disney used for generations. Then they even remade some of those movies. But all of that for Hayley Mills was only 5 years, but it would want to define her career for tons of fans. So when Disney sees NBC had cast Mills in this new teacher show, they are sold. In 1986, just before getting cast in Miss Bliss, Hayley Mills had actually starred in a made-for-TV Disney Channel sequel to The Parent Trap. So Disney had already been exploring restrengthening their relationship with her. She wasn't NBC's first choice, and they consider actually switching her out of the series after the pilot doesn't make it into NBC. ABC's primetime slot. But for Disney, she is the choice, and they get to keep her in it because they're steering that part of the show. And this is Disney running a play that they've actually run before with a ton of success— the same move they made showing classic Disney movies and putting the original Mickey Mouse Club on Disney Channel right before they rebooted it. You put something that the parents already know and trust in front of them, and then the bring the kids into the room, and it's nostalgia doing the marketing for you. I mean, Disney Channel still does this today. Decades later, Girl Meets World brings back a chunk of the Boy Meets World cast to hook the parents who grew up on the original while their kids watch this new show. It's the same move, but from a different decade, and that formula does work. I, I mean, I fell for that trick with Girl Meets World. I watched it, my kids watched it. But Good Morning, Miss Bliss bets a lot on Hayley Mills. She is this Bliss Show. The series is literally named after her character. I mean, it was developed about the teacher. She's the title role. Miss Bliss isn't a supporting teacher who shows up in a few episodes. She's the reason the show exists at all. School shows aimed at families, though, do need some kind of a balance. Sure, there are shows like Abbott Elementary, but that's a well-rounded ensemble cast of a whole teaching staff. If Miss Bliss is the main character and the students have to take a back seat, in hindsight, Especially, that seems like it would be hard to make it work. But think about it like this for a second. Imagine if Boy Meets World had been built entirely around Mr. Feeny instead of Cory. Feeny's a great character. He's necessary. Everybody loves him. But no one tunes in every week to watch Feeny's story. That's structurally what Good Morning, Miss Bliss was trying to do. It built its whole show around one adult and treated the students, the kids, as the supporting cast around her. They were more of the B-story. But the kids were talented, and the people watching the show wanted more of those kids in the show. So we've got a show that starts trying to be 2 things at the exact same time. It's trying to be a nostalgic family program for the grown-ups who remember Pollyanna. Hayley Mills is that warm, familiar actor, but now in a new grown-up role. Disney grown-up see themselves in her, but on the other hand, it's trying to be a show that kids want to watch because the characters feel like real kids with real problems getting into predicaments and getting away with it half the time. And those shows aren't the same show in this case. They, they just aren't. Trying to be both of those things at once is pretty much what sank it. Disney Channel never made a move on those extra 77 episodes. The show aired gets 13 episodes and the ratings just aren't there, and it gets canceled before the season even wraps up. That's it. That's the whole run. Goodbye, Miss Bliss. But NBC checks the tapes. They actually go back and look at the footage after the fact, and there's a bonus clip on the Saved by the Bell Complete Series DVD where the cast and crew kind of talk about this. What they land on is that Zack and Screech and Lisa Turtle, the student were characters people actually responded to.
11:49 --> 11:58 And I, and I showed this first scene to my daughter, who was a year younger than Mark-Paul. I said, what do you think? She said, I'm in love with Zack.
11:58 --> 12:26 Even while Miss Bliss was sitting right there as the lead, the kids were doing the heavy lifting the whole time. Nobody really planned it that way. It just happened. Those kids had the charisma. And they actually could have known this from the beginning, because here's a little story that proves that the kids were really great in a specific way well before the show even started filming. Lisa Turtle, the character Lark Voorhies played, wasn't originally written as the role we know.
12:26 --> 12:33 The character for Lisa, uh, was originally not an African-American role. It was for a Jewish-American princess.
12:33 --> 12:47 But when they brought Lark Voorhies in to see me just for a meet and greet, I said, have a read. I said, They said, have her read what? I said, have her read Lisa Terrell. They said, but she's not Black. And I said, she is now.
12:47 --> 15:11 But once Lark Voorhies came in, the producers rewrote the part around her. She was that good. The kids were that good, and they really stole the show. So Disney canceled it, but NBC Productions still owned the rights to Good Morning, Miss Bliss because NBC made it the whole time and Disney just aired it and steered it a little. So the second Disney Channel walked away, NBC still has this show sitting there fully paid for with characters people actually liked. And instead of throwing it out, NBC rebuilds it completely. And without Disney Channel involved, they can finally ditch Hayley Mills, which they weren't feeling too great about her in the first place. The setting of the show moves from Indianapolis all the way to a fictional town called Bayside in California. Some of the kids get kicked out, but new characters get added Kelly Kapowski, played by Tiffany Amber Thiessen, A.C. Slater, played by Mario Lopez, and Jessie Spano, played by Elizabeth Berkley. The kind of characters that would define the whole show going forward, and they would reinforce the Miss Bliss cast members who stole the show first season. Zack Morris, played by Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Screech, played by Dustin Diamond, Lark Voorhees' Lisa Turtle, and Mr. Belding, played by Dennis Haskins. Rest in peace. All of those characters kept their names and cross over into the new version untouched, and it's kinda weird. It's the same kids, it's the same principal, it's the same basic bones of the show, just none of that original teacher-adult concept that got it made in the first place. No Miss Bliss. I mean, it was stripped for parts. NBC didn't reboot the show, and they didn't start from scratch either. They literally took the pieces that were already working, them exactly what they were and built an entirely new show around them. Well, not exactly entirely new because they did then later recut the Miss Bliss episodes to be like this weird prequel episode situation to the Saved by the Bell episodes. And Zack would do like a disclaimer at the front about how this was a long time ago and they would just like air them with the Saved by the Bell stuff.
15:11 --> 15:23 When we were in junior high, Screech got me to write a love letter to Lisa Unfortunately, the letter fell into the wrong hands, and Miss Bliss, our teacher, wanted to kill me when Belding thought she was in love with him. Hey, what are friends for?
15:23 --> 16:13 Of course, they renamed the show because they didn't have a Miss Bliss anymore, so that old title didn't make sense. Saved by the Bell premieres in August of 1989, but it's not in primetime as a family sitcom the way Miss Bliss was intended. Saved by the Bell dropped right Into the Saturday morning block, the same time slot as cartoons, sitting right alongside them on a different channel. Saved by the Bell on NBC turned into a real phenomenon, and the reason comes down to that one change. The show is about the kids now. Belding sticks around for sure, but he's a side character. He shows up to give Zack detention. He reacts to whatever scheme is happening in his school.
16:13 --> 16:16 Hey, hey, hey, hey, what is going on here? I'm here!
16:16 --> 17:31 But he's never the one driving the plot. He maybe sets up a story, or he kind of orbits the story, but he never steers it. That's the formula that this show creates. Kids at the center, grown-ups necessary but never the focus. And once you see it here, you start seeing it everywhere. And ironically, especially in Disney shows. Even Boy Meets World over on ABC in primetime builds its whole show around Cory and his friends with Mr. Sweeney circling the outside of it, guiding things along, talking about it, giving it commentary, but never actually taking the wheel himself. Lizzie McGuire's mom and dad show up constantly in that show. They're a real part of the show, but nobody's tuning in to watch her parents and see what they're up to at work, even if it is Robert Carradine as her dad. And I mean, there's even more similarities between Lizzie McGuire and Saved by the Bell. The show follows Lizzie and her friends dealing sometimes similar situations at school, and her animated narrator self does that quintessential Zack Morris move, breaking the fourth wall and talking to the viewer.
17:31 --> 17:35 Who am I to deny my best friend the thing that makes her happy?
17:35 --> 19:46 The Suite Life of Zack and Cody is about Zack and Cody. Stuck in the Middle is about Harley and the kids, not the parents. The show— Jessie is not called Bertram. Sure, she's like a grown-up figure, but she's still a kid. She's a teenager. And then Bunk'd, that spinoff, is just like full of kids. That's the structure. Kids are the story, adults are supplementary. And Miss Bliss actually proved that formula way back when by failing to follow it. Disney Channel helped steer the show specifically to center around a Disney legend. That was the entire point for them of Miss Bliss. Put Hayley Mills in front and center and let her pull the nostalgic adults into the room. And that show only becomes a hit once Disney and Hayley Mills are gone from it completely. And that kind of tells us something about where Disney Channel actually was in the 1980s. They were still trying to figure out what they wanted to be and who their core audience was. Miss Bliss tried to be for kids and grown-ups, and it ended up being not good for either one. NBC just kept what did work, dropped what didn't, and the formula that came out the other side is the exact formula Disney Channel would lock into for basically every hit that followed. Thanks for joining me on this look at Saved by the Bell's secret Disney origins and really how it shaped every Disney show that came after it. Make sure you are subscribed so you don't miss these totally rad Disney connections in the future. And if you want more of this kind of Disney history, you could check out my Patreon. We go further down these rabbit holes over there. I'm currently doing a series that looks the 33 sponsors of Disneyland that probably inspired that exclusive Club 33. And there's a lot of other cool stuff there, some behind-the-scenes vlogs and all sorts of stuff like that. So go check it out on Patreon. For more Disney Channel videos, watch this next. And remember to keep discovering the magic in everything.