Fran Drescher Fanned Rumours Of A ‘Nanny’ Reboot, But Could It Really Happen?

As you are probably aware, here, in the year 2018, we have reached a pop cultural zenith where the sitcoms everyone watched on free-to-air in the late ’80s, ’90s, early ’00s – and tbh didn’t quite understand because we were children – are rearing their heads again: think Full House reboot, Fuller House, new eps of Will & Grace, the shortlived return of Roseanne….

Well, it’s now possible that the bouffant of sitcoms, The Nanny, might be joining their ranks. You remember it don’t you? The age-old tale of Fran Fine from Queens, as she goes from dumped and selling cosmetics door-to-door to the nanny for the three upstart children of millionaire Broadway producer Maxwell Sheffield.

The show’s co-creator and star, one 60-year-old Fran Drescher – on whose life growing up in Queens the show is (loosely) based – told Entertainment Tonight earlier this week that she and her co-creator/ex-husband Peter Marc Jacobson, have been in talks to revive the series:

We’re talking about it. Peter and I are talking about it. We’re working on a very big project. It’s going to be very exciting for the fans, but I’m not at liberty to announce it yet. But it’s gonna be big.

Our show would be the same characters 20 years later. [But] we can’t just pick up where we left off. In a way, that could be really good because the show can have a whole fresh bend to it.

Drescher also said she reckons – spoiler: Fine and Sheffield get married at the end of the series – that her character would now be using all that dosh and her “big Queens mouth” to make a social impact: “Fran [Fine] would’ve maybe gotten involved in more things [that] Fran Drencher is involved with. All kinds of things from environmental issues, to health, to civil liberties, that’s what I think Fran would be doing now – opening her big Queens mouth for the greater good.”

The Nanny originally aired between 1993 and 1999  – the heyday of naming characters ‘Niles‘ (yeah, Frasier started in 1993 too) – and we vaguely recall watching it on Channel 10 when we were but wee cherubs, probably in prime time after The Simpsons and Neighbours, all the while desperately wishing we were one of the crazy-rich Sheffield heirs.

We also know the show was extremely popular in Australia – according to a Hollywood Reporter story from 1997, The Nanny was the #1 program in Australia at the time.

Still, it’s worth considering where the series’ actors are now before anyone gets too excited: Daniel Davis, who played Niles the butler, is – at 72 – still killing it in the theatre world, while Lauren Lane aka CC Babcock has largely moved from performing in the theatre to teaching drama at Texas State University.

Nicholle Tom and Madeline Zima (Margaret and Grace Sheffield) still pop up in small roles in film and on the telly, while their on-screen dad, Englishman Charles Shaughnessy – who is a legit BARON: his full title is ‘The Right Honourable The Lord Shaughnessy’ – is much the same: he had a recurring role in Mad Men for a little while. Same diff for 85-year-old Renée Taylor as Fran’s ma, Sylvia Fine, and Rachel Chagall as her best mate, Val Toriello.

Sadly, the actress who played Grandma Yetta, Ann Guilbert – the show’s MVP – passed away back in 2016.

For something completely different: Benjamin Salisbury, who played Brighton Sheffield, is apparently super busy now running a theme park: he appears to be the Director of Operations at Universal Studios Hollywood.

And finally Drescher herself, who as the show’s co-creator is 100% on board to come back, despite the fact that she’s busy as hell: she’s politically active, and has become an ordained minister so she can officiate LGBT weddings; she still does bit parts in movies and TV,  like in Broad City, for example; she’s sometimes on Broadway; she writes books; and just all the things, okay? She does all the things.

Here’s hoping everyone finds time in their rammed schedules to make something, at the very least so we get to hear this one again. It’s an important theme song if there ever was one, if not for its use of ‘fanny’ and ‘joie de vivre’, then the sentence that sums up how all our relationships start: “She had style, she had flair, she was there.”

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