MovieChat Forums > Three's Company (1977) Discussion > Terri's exit explained by a throwaway li...

Terri's exit explained by a throwaway line from Ralph Furley.

posted 5 years ago by LolaVerdon (131)
2 replies | jump to latest

What a slap in the face to her character.

Even Janet got that makeshift wedding which looks like it was thrown together in a few minutes.

But Terri really got the shaft.

They did let her turn out the lights to the apartment at the end but basically her character got an offhand reference to moving to Hawaii and that was that. How insulting. Why couldn't she have just stayed in the apartment and gotten some new, maybe male roommates ala Barrie Youngfellow? That might have been a funnier way to write out her character rather than just pack up and leave because Jack and Janet did.

They really made it all about Jack and Vicki and her overbearing father. I love John Ritter but he should have gone to bat for the other characters as he had that clout. Weird that he just let them all get the most perfunctory ending possible and focus on him and his character pretty much exclusively. He seemed like a more generous actor than that but hey, nobody's perfect. (Rest in Peace, Mr. Ritter).

At any rate, it was all handled rather shabbily. Phillip had no personality per se. He may as well have been played by a robot no offense to the actor who went on to host Supermarket Sweep in those 80's sweaters, LOL. Janet had no chemistry with the men they paired her up with except perhaps for Jack of course. Terri was a hot looking woman who should have had men buzzing around her but was treated for the most part as a sexless object with no other role that as Janet's talk to/appendage.

Well, what do you all think they could have done to write Terri out better? And was it a coincidence that Terri was named Alden as in Priscilla Alden, the pilgrim? Am I the only one who noticed this connection with both famous Priscilla's?

[–] [deleted] 5 years ago

I think we can all agree that the last few episodes of Three's Company were garbage. The writers were so eager to set the show up for the crappy, inferior spin off (Three's a Crowd) that they didn't even bother giving it a proper conclusion.

[–] [deleted] 5 years ago

This was the heyday of T&A TV... What the writer put on the page never really mattered as long as they could find a big breasted actress to jiggle her tits each week and give men the misguided hope that on any given episode their might be a wardrobe slip... Remember these were the early days of TV before Skinamax was in every house so you have to your wood anywhere you could find it... Just look back at some old photos of those cheesy battle of the network stars shows where the only goal was getting the actresses in the tightest swimsuits or short possible before praying to the wind gods to send a gust to turn on her high beams.