TLDR: Suzanne Somers was fired from Three’s Company in 1981 after demanding her salary increase from $30,000 to $150,000 per episode to match co-star John Ritter’s pay. ABC refused due to “Favored Nations” contract clauses that would have forced them to raise everyone’s salary, and Somers was reduced to 60-second phone call appearances before being terminated.
She was blacklisted from TV for nearly a decade but eventually built a $300 million business empire.
In 1980, Three’s Company was the second most-watched show on television. Suzanne Somers, who played the lovable Chrissy Snow, had become a household name, appearing on the cover of 55 magazines and selling posters, dolls, and lunchboxes. She was a merchandising machine and believed she deserved to be paid like the star she’d become.
What happened next destroyed one of TV’s most popular shows and turned Somers into a cautionary tale about what happens when you ask for too much.
But the real story is more complicated than just a greedy actress asking for too much money. It involves contract fine print, network power plays, and a brutal example-making that kept other actresses in line for years.
The Salary Gap That Started Everything
By the time Three’s Company entered its fifth season in late 1980, the show was a massive hit. It ranked number two in the Nielsen ratings with a 26.3 rating, generating huge advertising revenue for ABC. The show made its production company and the network incredibly wealthy, but the stars weren’t sharing equally in that success.
John Ritter, who played Jack Tripper, was earning approximately $50,000 per episode according to producer Ted Bergmann. However, Somers and her husband/manager Alan Hamel believed Ritter was making upwards of $150,000 per episode plus a percentage of the show’s syndication profits.
Meanwhile, Somers was earning around $30,000 per episode. While that was good money for the time (about $110,000 in today’s dollars), it was a fraction of what male leads on comparable hit shows were making.
Somers saw the inequality clearly. “The men were making 10 to 15 times more than I was… and I was on the No. 1 show. It just seemed wrong because I was clearly being underpaid,” she later said.
Her argument was simple: if she drew the same audience as a male star, she should be paid the same.
The Demand That Changed Everything
In the fall of 1980, as production for Season 5 started, Alan Hamel presented ABC with Somers’s new contract demands. They were huge for that time, especially for a woman in an ensemble cast. Somers wanted her salary increased from $30,000 to $150,000 per episode, a five-fold raise, plus a 10% share of the show’s net profits, giving her a piece of the lucrative syndication money.
ABC’s response was brutal. The network offered to raise her salary by only $5,000, bringing her to $35,000 per episode. The gap between what she asked for ($150,000) and what they offered ($35,000) was impossible to bridge.
But the network’s refusal wasn’t just about not wanting to pay her more. It was about contract clauses that most people didn’t know about.
The Contract Trap: Favored Nations Clauses
What Somers and Hamel didn’t fully understand was that giving her a raise would trigger a domino effect that would blow up the show’s budget. Joyce DeWitt, who played Janet Wood, had a “Most Favored Nations” clause in her contract that guaranteed she’d be paid the same as Somers. If Somers got $150,000 per episode, DeWitt would automatically get $150,000 too.
But it got worse. John Ritter had a clause guaranteeing he’d be the highest-paid cast member “no matter what.” So if Somers and DeWitt both jumped to $150,000, Ritter’s pay would have to go even higher.
This meant Somers’s $120,000 raise wasn’t just a $120,000 problem. It would have instantly increased the per-episode payroll by nearly half a million dollars once everyone’s contractual raises kicked in. The producers and network saw this as an explosion in costs that would make the show unprofitable.
Ritter himself was reportedly confused by Somers’s demand because he thought she knew about his contract’s clause, meaning that by definition, no one else could ever get equal pay with him.
The Laverne & Shirley Effect
The timing of Somers’s negotiation made things even worse. Just months before, ABC had gone through a brutal salary fight with Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams from Laverne & Shirley. That duo had successfully forced the network to give them massive raises, and ABC executives were still smarting from the battle.
The “Sick-Out” Strategy That Backfired
When negotiations stalled, Somers started missing work, claiming medical issues. She missed the taping of the season’s second episode and later the fourth episode, “Downhill Chaser,” citing a broken rib and back pain. While the injuries might have been real, everyone on set interpreted it as a negotiation tactic.
The impact on production was chaos. Sitcoms run on strict weekly schedules, and Somers’s absences forced writers to scramble and rewrite scripts overnight to remove Chrissy from scenes.
Lines meant for her got reassigned to other characters, creating awkward episodes. The crew’s work schedules were thrown into disarray, costing the production company serious money.
The friendly atmosphere on set evaporated. John Ritter and Joyce DeWitt, both professionally trained theater actors who took their work seriously, saw Somers’s absences as a betrayal. Ritter was furious, feeling she was endangering the jobs of the entire crew—camera operators, makeup artists, set designers—whose livelihoods depended on the show staying in production.
DeWitt and Somers, who had been close friends and shared a dressing room, stopped speaking entirely.
The Humiliating Phone Call Exile
ABC’s response was calculated and cruel. Rather than fire Somers immediately, which could have led to a wrongful termination lawsuit, the network forced her to finish her Season 5 contract under humiliating conditions.
The producers created a storyline where Chrissy had to return to her parents’ home in Fresno to care for her sick mother. Somers’s role was slashed to brief, 60-second segments at the end of episodes where Chrissy would call the apartment and talk to Jack or Janet on the phone.
The conditions were designed to isolate and punish her. Somers was banned from the main soundstage while the other actors were there. She could only enter the studio after everyone else had finished work for the day. Reports say she was escorted to and from the set by a police guard, treated more like a security threat than a lead actress.
The phone calls were filmed on a separate bare set with just a chair, a phone, and a lamp. There were no other actors present. Somers performed monologues into a prop phone with no audience and no interaction with her co-stars. These appearances added nothing to the episodes and were creatively dead. Somers later said, “It just felt so like I was being punished like I was a bad girl. It brought up all my old feelings of low self-worth.”
The Replacements and Ratings Drop
With Somers in Fresno exile, the show needed a new blonde roommate. They brought in Jenilee Harrison as Cindy Snow, Chrissy’s clumsy cousin, to cover the rent. Harrison was only 21 and inexperienced, suddenly tasked with replacing the most popular woman on television.
The writers tried to make Cindy different by focusing on physical comedy and clumsiness rather than Chrissy’s innocent misunderstandings, but the audience response was lukewarm.
Recognizing that Cindy wasn’t working long-term, the producers brought in Priscilla Barnes as Terri Alden for Season 6. Terri was the opposite of Chrissy—a smart, competent registered nurse. This was a deliberate move away from the “dumb blonde” character to refresh the show and distance it from the Somers era.
Barnes later called her time on the show the “worst years of her life” due to the toxic backstage atmosphere.
The ratings showed the damage. Three’s Company had been the number two show, but during the messy Season 5, it dropped to number eight. The show recovered somewhat in Season 6, climbing back to number four with Barnes, showing that while Somers was a huge draw, John Ritter’s physical comedy was strong enough to keep the show going for a few more years.
But by Season 8, the ratings collapsed to number 33, and the show was cancelled.
The Legal Battle and Blacklisting
When ABC officially fired Somers at the end of Season 5 in spring 1981, she sued the network for $2 million, claiming her career had been destroyed and she’d been wrongfully terminated. The case went to arbitration, and Somers lost decisively.
The arbitrator ruled that she had breached her contract by missing episode tapings and was only entitled to $30,000—the unpaid salary for one episode she’d missed due to a legitimate injury (the broken rib). The ruling validated the network’s hardline approach.
The professional consequences were devastating. For nearly a decade, Somers was effectively blacklisted from television. “I was fired from the No. 1 show at the height of my success, and I couldn’t get a job in television,” she said. “I couldn’t get an interview.”
The industry used her firing as a warning to other actresses about what happens when you challenge the studio pay structure.
The ThighMaster Comeback
Unable to get TV work, Somers reinvented herself outside Hollywood. She launched a successful Las Vegas residency and, more importantly, embraced infomercials—a format most “serious” actors looked down on. She became the face of the ThighMaster exercise device, and crucially, she and Hamel secured ownership rights to the product.
This turned out to be far more profitable than Three’s Company ever could have been. Somers built a lifestyle and wellness empire eventually worth upwards of $300 million. Looking back years later, she said, “That was the great thing about being fired… I would have never been able to do what I do now.”
The Long Road to Reconciliation
The wounds from 1980 took decades to heal. For over twenty years, Somers, Ritter, and DeWitt had no contact. The cast excluded Somers entirely from reunions and retrospectives, maintaining the “family” narrative of the show without her.
The ice finally broke in late 2003, just one month before John Ritter’s sudden death from an aortic dissection. Ritter called Somers—their first conversation in over two decades—to ask if she’d make a guest appearance on his sitcom 8 Simple Rules in a dream sequence with Joyce DeWitt. Somers, still uncomfortable with seeing DeWitt, declined, but she described the conversation as “tearful, emotional, and heartwarming.” They reconciled before Ritter passed away.
The feud with Joyce DeWitt lasted even longer. It wasn’t until 2012—31 years after Somers left the show—that the two women reunited. DeWitt appeared on Somers’s online talk show, and the reunion was emotional. Somers apologized, acknowledging her own “immaturity” and “small-mindedness,” admitting she hadn’t fully understood how her actions affected her co-stars’ lives.
DeWitt accepted the apology, wanting to honor Three’s Company as a source of joy rather than conflict.
In the years since, the way people view Somers’s departure has completely changed. In 1980, the media painted her as greedy and arrogant. But modern analysis often frames her as a pioneer for gender pay equity.
She was the first female star of a top-rated sitcom to explicitly demand equal pay with her male co-star. Her firing was a brutal enforcement of the status quo that suppressed similar demands for years.
Somers maintained until her death in 2023 that her demand was right. “I was the first feminist to ask to be paid what the men were making,” she stated. While her strategy failed because of the contract clauses and ABC’s aggressive stance, her stand highlighted the massive pay gaps that defined the era.
By building a business empire independent of the studio system, she proved the network wrong in one crucial way: she wasn’t just a creation of their writers.
She achieved financial success that far exceeded the $150,000 paycheck she was once denied, turning her firing into the catalyst for something much bigger.
