What Do Geena Davis, Bill Maher, Alfre Woodard and Bronson Pinchot Have in Common?

When viewers tuned into Sara, which aired its final episode on May 8, 1985 on NBC, they likely had no idea they were watching a group of stars-in-the-making. The sitcom starred Oscar winner Geena Davis before her Oscar win, before Thelma & Louise, and before A League of Their Own. It also featured Alfre Woodard before St. Elsewhere, Bronson Pinchot before Perfect Strangers, Bill Maher before Politically Incorrect and Real Time, and Matthew Lawrence before Boy Meets World. Sitcoms rarely come with more impressive casts. So why haven’t you ever heard of it?

In the show, Davis played a single San Francisco woman sharing an office with three other attorneys — best friend Rozalyn (Woodard), the upstanding Dennis (Pinchot), and the low-down Marty (Maher). The Waltons’ Ronnie Claire Edwards played Helen, the office secretary and mother figure, while musician Mark Hudson played Sara’s neighbor, Stuart; Lawrence played his 4-year-old son, Jesse.

There was impressive talent behind the scenes, too. Family Ties creator Gary David Goldberg dreamed up the show with colleague Ruth Bennett, and Goldberg went on to co-create Spin City, another sitcom with Family Ties star Michael J. Fox. Another producer on Sara was Late Night head writer Merrill Markoe, who was dating David Letterman at the time (and came up with his “Stupid Pet Tricks” bit).

Some of the actors had already gotten breaks in Hollywood — Woodard had gotten an Emmy for Hill Street Blues and an Oscar nomination for Cross Creek, and Pinchot had a scene-stealing role in Beverly Hills Cop — but playing the “office creep” on Sara marked Maher’s first regular acting role. “I got on a big show, a sitcom on NBC that was on after Family Ties,” the comedian said on the Fly on the Wall podcast earlier this year. “It was a big thing with a big producer Gary David Goldberg, so that put me on that path [to success].”

© NBC/courtesy Everett Collection

The show also gave Maher his first sizable paycheck. “When I did that first sitcom, I remember my salary was $7,500 a week, [which] previously had been my yearly earnings as a comedian,” he said on the podcast. “A little more than that yearly, but maybe not really when I lived in New York.”

As for Pinchot, he played an openly gay man, a rarity on TV at the time, though he found that his character’s gayness seemed to be downplayed. “They were so afraid that nobody would want to do the gay lawyer that they didn’t even show us the script. It was 1984!” he said of the audition process in a 2009 A.V. Club interview. “So they said, ‘Well, we just want somebody likable, and here’s your line, say this line.’ … Then, when we started to rehearse it, I would think of funny things to do, and I was like, ‘I want to be misting the plants, and I want to be doing this,’ and they said, ‘No, no, no, no, you can’t do anything that’s, like, actually gay. We’ll give you one line a show that’s like, I sleep with men.’”

Davis, who’d gotten her first on-screen credit as Dustin Hoffman’s fellow soap actor in 1982’s Tootsie, was still a year away from her breakthrough in The Fly with future hubby Jeff Goldblum; at the time, all she had under her belt were a few guest-star spots and a supporting role on the Dabney Coleman sitcom Buffalo Bill.

NBC executives pitched the show as an updated Mary Tyler Moore Show — with Goldberg telling the Los Angeles Times that it was the idea of then-network president Brandon Tartikoff to “bring the single-girl genre into the ’80s” — but Sara didn’t match that predecessor’s success. It didn’t catch on with the “rising tide of upwardly mobile, increasingly sophisticated TV viewers” to which it was aimed, per the Times.

ph: Jim Cornfield / TV Guide / courtesy Everett Collection

And it didn’t help that NBC scheduled Sara opposite the ABC hit Dynasty, which was then the No. 1 show on television. Sara only lasted for 13 episodes — the last of which aired 40 years ago today — though NBC did air reruns in 1988, after Davis’ film Beetlejuice came out. Sara isn’t streaming at the time of this writing, but episodes are currently available on YouTube and the Internet Archive.

Davis’ next full-time TV role, on 2000’s The Geena Davis Show, didn’t last much longer, but the actor took those show’s demises in stride. “The fact that they failed doesn’t really register for me,” she told Oprah Winfrey for a 2006 interview in O Magazine. “I put something out there, and whatever happens, happens. … I don’t [have any anxiety about past failures]. I just dive in. I can’t know what’s going to succeed. There’s no point in being cautious, because then you don’t get a chance to do stuff you really want to do. I want to do parts that I feel strongly about and that I think I can do a good job with.”

Luckily for all of us, Sara wasn’t the last we saw of Davis and her cast mates!