“Three’s Company” proved to be an out-of-the-box hit. After four successful seasons at the top of the ratings, Suzanne Somers asked to negotiate her contract. At the time, she told Fox News, she was earning $30,000 per episode — one-fifth of the $150,000-an-episode salary of co-star John Ritter. “And I was on the No. 1 show. It just seemed wrong because I was clearly being underpaid,” she explained.
The network, however, didn’t see it that way. When she asked to receive the same salary was Ritter, she was offered an extra $5,000. Somers was eventually fired, with the PR spin machine creating a narrative that she was ungrateful, greedy, difficult to work with. “Now, I was out of work and labeled ‘trouble’ only because I wanted to be paid fairly for doing my job,” Somers said. According to Somers’ husband/manager Alan Hamel, she was a sacrificial lamb, fired to send a message to ABC’s other female stars. “The network was willing to do this because earlier that year the women on ‘Laverne & Shirley’ had gotten what they asked for and they wanted to put a stop to it,” Hamel told The Hollywood Reporter.
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Suddenly, one of TV’s hottest stars was persona non grata in Hollywood. “After I was fired, I couldn’t get a job,” Somers told InStyle in 2020. “And I still don’t know what they told the cast, but everyone turned against me.”
