Trivia / Designing Women

• The Cast Showoff: In exchange for performing Julia's decidedly left-wing rants, Dixie Carter (a Republican) requested that the character be allowed to sing in a number of episodes.
  • Jean Smart also sang on the show. Pretty much everybody performed at one point or other, once even in blackface (Suzanne).
• Dueling Shows: With The Golden Girls, another Four-Girl Ensemble series that premiered a year earlier on NBC. Although both were quite popular, The Golden Girls won many Emmys and always had higher ratings (so much that Designing Women eventually had to be moved to another night altogether.) Years later, both shows would air back to back on Lifetime.
• Friday Night Death Slot : The show moved to Friday nights in its last season, just prior to being cancelled.
• Hide Your Pregnancy: Averted with Jean Smart (see Real Life Writes the Plot below) but played straight with Annie Potts later.
• Hostility on the Set:
  • Delta Burke publicly feuded not only with the show's creators, Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, due to working long hours, labor disputes, and the direction of the show, she also feuded with co-star and on-screen sister Dixie Carter due to her repeatedly siding with the Thomasons over her. This all culminated in her firing, but she did eventually make up with all three of them (though she and Carter didn't speak for ten years).
  • A more minor example came with Carter, who was a Republican^note  albeit a Left/Libertarian-leaning one while Bloodworth-Thomason was a staunch liberal, with Carter's character Julia Sugarbaker serving as a mouthpiece for Bloodworth-Thomason's politics who regularly goes on fiery political rants. They soon came to a deal: every time Carter had to deliver a monologue that she disagreed with, she got to sing on air in a future episode. (Carter did wind up supporting Bill Clinton later on, though.)
• Irony as She Is Cast: As mentioned above, the conservative Dixie Carter played the very liberal Julia Sugarbaker.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The syndicated version of the series' episodes were cut for additional commercials and had some of the raunchiest humor and material edited out. Additionally, the theme song and opening sequence used in seasons 1-2 is gone completely, replaced by a shorter version of the season 3-5 theme and opening titles. The syndicated episodes being "butchered" was a common complaint amongst the series' fans as the unedited episodes remained locked away until Shout! Factory released the series to DVD from 2009-2012. However, streaming services like Hulu still utilize the syndicated episodes, as such the DVD sets so far remain to be the only way to watch the unedited episodes.
• Real-Life Relative:
  • Delta Burke's Real Life husband Gerald McRaney played one of Suzanne's ex-husbands; Dixie Carter's Real Life husband Hal Holbrook played Julia's longtime sweetheart, Reese Watson, until the character's death.
  • In the episode "The Naked Truth," Julia's visiting nieces are played by Dixie Carter's real-life daughters, Mary Dixie and Ginna.
• Romance on the Set: Both Delta Burke and Jean Smart met their husbands, Gerald McRaney and Richard Gilliland, respectively, when they guest-starred on the show.
• Screwed by the Network: Designing Women found its greatest success when paired with Murphy Brown on Monday nights. Even with the cast changes for season 6, ratings held up within the top ten thanks to one of the new cast members being the popular Saturday Night Live alumni Jan Hooks. However, for the fall 1992 season CBS moved Designing Women and Major Dad to Friday nights and paired them with new shows Golden Palace (a continuation of The Golden Girls absent Bea Arthur) and Bob (1992) (starring veteran sitcom star Bob Newhart) in an ill-fated attempt to compete against ABC's popular TGIF lineup. Ratings tanked and Designing Women was cancelled in 1993 alongside Major Dad and Golden Palace.
• What Could Have Been: As noted above, Designing Women ultimately met its demise due to CBS separating it from Murphy Brown and moving it to Friday nights, which lead to a dramatic ratings drop. Fans of the series have wondered how much longer it could have run had CBS left it where it was.
  • Jackée Harry appears as Vanessa in the season six finale, and is very clearly being set up to join the main cast. When season seven commenced, however, the new character was not Vanessa, who was never mentioned again. Harry has stated that she did not get along with Carter off-camera AT ALL, so the plot was abandoned.

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