Norman Lear has television superstar Conrad Bain under contract and Fred Silverman wants to build a show around Bain and a talented black child actor named Gary Coleman.  Entitled Diff’rent Strokes and featuring Todd Bridges and Dana Plato as Coleman’s brother and stepsister, the show is a hit.  The three young actors briefly become superstars, much like the amazing Conrad Bain.  And then, when the show is finally canceled after ten years, it all goes downhill as Todd Bridges and Dana Plato run into trouble with drugs and the law and Gary Coleman, once one of the highest paid stars on television, discovers that he’s now flat broke.  All three of them learn how quickly the world can turn on you when you’re no longer considered to be a success.

Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of ‘Diff’rent Strokes’ was another one NBC’s cheap movies about the behind-the-scenes drama of a popular sitcom.  (They also did Three’s Company and Mork & Mindy).  Like all of NBC’s Behind the Camera movies, it makes the mistake of thinking that everyone is as interested in the habits of network executives as the people who work for them are.  (This time, it’s Saul Rubinek who gets to play Fred Silverman.)  The actors who plays Bridges, Coleman, and Plato are convincing enough but the storytelling is shallow, featuring the same information that you would expect to find in an episode of the E! True Hollywood Story.  I was disappointed that we didn’t get any scenes of Alan Thicke recording the theme song.

Todd Bridges and the late Gary Coleman both appear as themselves, talking about their experiences with the show and the difficulties of navigating life after Diff’rent Strokes was canceled.  Bridges is down-to-Earth while Coleman rambles like someone who was still trying to figure out how his life had led up to this moment.  The ending, in which Bridges and Coleman stand at Dana Plato’s grave and Coleman delivers a nearly incoherent monologue, is the one time that the film really captures any feeling of emotional honesty.  It is obvious that both Bridges and Coleman are still haunted by what happened to Plato after the show ended.  Knowing that Coleman himself would die just four years after the airing of this movie makes the scene more poignant when viewed today.