"There's no place like home. With your family around you, you're never alone. " - "227" Theme Song
227: The Complete First Season DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
If you were a highly paid TV actor and your show was cancelled after its tenth season, what would you do? Travel the world? Catch up on your reading? Go to Disneyland? Not Marla Gibbs. Within a few weeks of her last performance as the smart-mouthed maid Florence on The Jeffersons, Gibbs purchased the rights to a stage play called 227, had it developed into a sitcom, and began filming the new series. In July 1985, The Jeffersons ran for the last time on CBS. Two months later, on September 14, 1985, 227 joined NBC's Saturday night lineup.
Set in Washington, DC, the series follows the residents of building number 227, a solidly middle-class apartment house located in a neighbor that is rapidly becoming gentrified with posh condominiums. Gibbs plays Mary Jenkins, a no-nonsense housewife. Mary's construction supervisor husband, Lester (Hal Williams), is a caring, dependable father to their teenage daughter, Brenda (Regina King). Mary's best friend is Rose Lee Holloway (Alaina Reed-Hall), a gossipy widow. The two pals love to sit on the stoop and discuss their lives.and the lives of anyone else who happens to wander by. Sandra Clark (Jackee Harry) is the building's resident vamp, a sashaying mantrap whose haughty attitude often sets her at odds with down-to-earth Mary. Pearl Shay (Helen Martin) is an elderly busybody who observes all of 227's comings and goings from her perch at the window of her first floor apartment. Rounding out the building's principal residents are Calvin (Curtis Baldwin), Pearl's seventeen year-old grandson (and Brenda's boyfriend), and Rose's daughter Tiffany (Kia Goodwin).
227's plotlines are far from innovative. Some of the devices used in the pilot (Mary decides to report the building's code violations to the city when she thinks that Sandra is about to inherit the building and kick her out, but she regrets her actions when it turns out that Rose is actually the new landlady) and in "The Sidewalk Sale" (Mary sells an ugly lamp that Lester loves, not realizing that he has stashed a large sum of money in it) would have seemed right at home on I Love Lucy thirty-five years earlier. Even when the situations are familiar, however, the show is still successful, usually because the writers are able to put a fresh spin on well-worn stories. Try not to laugh at "Honesty," in which a torn Mary cannot decide whether to put a note on a car whose taillight she damaged when parking. She finally does the right thing but lives to regret it when a hit-and-run driver practically demolishes the car that now holds a note in which she claims responsibility for the fender bender. The situation becomes even kookier when Sandra agrees to pretend that she's Mary in order to win over the car's owner with her feminine wiles. This is nothing that we haven't seen before, but it's still pretty funny.
One reason that the show is so fresh is that its characters are relatively unique, especially for a show created in 1985. Rather than depicting African-Americans living in poverty (Sanford & Son, Good Times) or as nouveau riche (The Cosby Show, The Jeffersons), Gibbs developed the show, in part, because she wanted the nation's large black middle-class to be portrayed on TV. The result is that the characters and their concerns can be easily related to by a broad cross section of viewers. The show is warm and funny, with the residents of the building serving as an extended family to each other, and to its viewers.
The entire cast is strong - Gibbs especially proves her versatility by playing a character that is completely unlike snappy Florence - but Harry is the show's breakout star. She has the gift of being able to deliver even the dullest of lines in a way that provokes laughs. With her clingy dresses, mincing walk, and honey-coated buzz-saw vocal style, she manages to steal almost every scene in which she appears.
Several guest stars appear in the first season. The Naked Gun's Leslie Nielson plays a Secret Service agent who investigates Mary when she writes a "Letter to the President." Wrestling weirdo (and Cyndi Lauper video star) Captain Lou Albano plays an old associate of Lester's who is hired to be 227's handyman, but harbors a big secret (not to mention several rubber bands in his beard) in "We the People." In "Fifty Big Ones," Beah Richards (Roots: The Next Generations) and Whitman Mayo (Sanford & Son) play Mary's parents who come to town to celebrate their 50th by renewing their marriage vows.provided they even want to stay married.
It should be noted that the episodes are presented here in production order, not broadcast order. The production order apparently varies wildly from the show's original airdates. Ordinarily, this wouldn't really be a problem for a sitcom. Here, however, it is a flaw. The pilot episode was actually aired six episodes into the series. Since it was produced first, it is presented as the first episode on disc one. The pilot features a cliffhanger ending that is continued in "The Sidewalk Sale." "Sidewalk" was not filmed until later on in the season, so it appears as the first episode on disc two. Since the packaging does not indicate that the episodes are part one and part two of a single story, viewers will be left to figure out for themselves that the conclusion of the first episode in the set is actually found on disc two.
The twenty-two episodes that make up the first season are divided onto three discs. The discs are housed in slim, clear keepcases. The front covers are yellow and each feature a separate, small cast photo. The back covers include episode numbers, episode titles, plot synopses, and basic creative credits. The double-sided coversheets show through to the inside of the case, but the interiors are simply solid yellow. The DVDs are black with "227" printed in a bold yellow font. The three keepcases slide into a cardboard sleeve which showcases Gibbs and Harry in front of a stoop.
The DVD menus feature static cast photos. Viewers can play all episodes or choose an individual episode. Although there are no scene selection menus, chapter stops are included.
