A Look Back at the 1988 Television Series

See my previous article The Dirty Dancing Television Series in 1988-1989.

The Yahoo Entertainment website has published an article titled Dirty Dancing: Melora Hardin Looks Back at the 1988 TV Series You’ve Forgotten, written by Mandi Bierly. The article includes the following photograph and passages.

Patrick Cassidy as Johnny Castle and Melora Hardin as Baby Kellerman 

On Saturday, Oct. 29, 1988, just 14 months after the Patrick Swayze-Jennifer Grey film hit theaters, CBS premiered Dirty Dancing the series. Future Transparent Emmy nominee Melora Hardin starred as Baby, who, in this version, is the 18-year-old daughter of Kellerman’s owner Max.

In the summer of 1963, before she heads off to Mount Holyoke College in the fall, she returns to Kellerman’s to reconnect with her philandering father, who she’d chosen not to see after he and her mother divorced years earlier. She’s hoping for a job as a waitress, but Max hands her the title of talent coordinator — a position that had been held by dance instructor Johnny Castle (Patrick Cassidy), a 23-year-old from Jersey who spends the winter months as a mechanic. ...

... she owes the job to producer Steve Tisch, who worked with her on the 1986 C. Thomas Howell film Soul Man before turning his attention to the half-hour Dirty Dancing series. “I feel like he kind of just decided I was going to be Baby,” she says.

It was fitting, really, because Hardin, who’d grown up as a serious dancer — she went to the Joffrey Ballet in New York on scholarship when she was 13 — had a history with Patrick Swayze. When she was around the same young age, the studio in Toluca Lake, California, where she studied ballet decided to add a jazz class — and a pre-fame Swayze taught it.

“I think he taught for at least six months or a year. Always arriving on his motorcycle,” she says. “I just remember the tight jeans — tight in the front and the back, I will just point out. His long ’70s hairdo. He just was so sexy and so warm and sweet. I remember being like, ‘Oh my God.’ I think my tongue was out of my mouth the entire class. What a lovely, lovely guy he was. ...

The film’s choreographer, Kenny Ortega, was also doing the show. Although she didn’t exactly get to work with him as much as Cassidy did: “I was really a better dancer than Patrick [Cassidy] was. That was kind of hard for me to play down, at first,” she says, “just because I really wanted to dance.” ...

In the series premiere, Johnny suggests Baby join the staff’s dance number for an upcoming show and throws her into a rehearsal to embarrass her. “There’s a whole section where everyone’s dancing and I’m trying to catch the steps and I’m totally out of rhythm — everyone’s going down and I’m standing up. ...” Hardin says. ....

Hardin remembers the network being concerned about how dirty the dirty dancing got. “I think it’s really the first scene where Baby and Johnny dance together. I come in, in that pretty, flowy little dress. I remember loving that dress. And the dancers were all dancers that I took classes with, and it was pretty raunchy. They were, like, in there,” she says with a laugh. “They were grinding and dancing, and even the stuff Patrick and I did was pretty sexy.”

Although there’s real heat between Baby and Johnny — they even share a kiss in the second half hour, when he’s trying to convince her not to leave Kellerman’s following a fight with her father — Baby is quick to cool things off. At the end of the second episode, after she’s returned to appear in the group number, they’re back at the staff quarters dancing when Johnny asks if there might be a chance for them after all. “I told you, all I wanted to do was learn how to dance,” Baby says, leaving him. ...

Anticipation for the show’s debut was naturally high. “Everyone thought this was going to be a huge series,” Hardin says.

So why wasn’t it? “I don’t know. I remember one critic not liking that I was not ‘Jewish-looking,’ because she’s supposed to be Jewish. I don’t know if that was the thing. I mean, I think the series was good. … Who knows why these things do catch on or don’t,” she says. ...

There is more information and photographs in the entire article. Best of all, the article includes a 46-minute video that includes the series' first two episodes.