Diff’rent Strokes with different folks!
ABC has revealed that Live in Front of a Studio Audience will be recreating episodes of Diff’rent Strokes and The Facts of Life for its third installment of the live event on December 7.
Between Diff’rent Strokes and The Facts of Life, several fan favorites have been cast for the live event including John Lithgow, Kevin Hart, Damon Wayans, Ann Dowd, Jennifer Aniston, Kathryn Hahn, and more who will be taking on iconic roles.
Jimmy Kimmel is serving as an executive producer alongside Norman Lear, Brent Miller, Kerry Washington, Will Ferrell, Justin Theroux, and Jim Burrows.
Lear noted in a press statement, “Other than with my family, there’s no place I’d rather be in my 100th year than on a soundstage at Sony with these glorious actors reliving what our company had produced all those years ago and sharing it with the millions of viewers who could use a little laughter.”
Diff’rent Strokes premiered on NBC in 1978 before moving to ABC where it ran until 1986. The series centered on Arnold and Willis Jackson, two Black boys from Harlem taken in by a rich white Park Avenue businessman and widower, Phillip Drummond.
Spinoff The Facts of Life featured the Drummonds’ former housekeeper Edna Garrett becoming the housemother of a dormitory at Eastland School, a private all-girls school in Peekskill, New York.
In 2019, Live in Front of a Studio Audience re-created episodes of Lear’s classic sitcoms All in the Family, The Jeffersons, and Good Times.
Scroll down below to see the cast of Diff’rent Strokes and The Facts of Life then and now.
Live in Front of a Studio Audience, Tuesday, December 7, ABC and then streaming on Hulu
