TV URBAN LEGEND: Bosom Buddies was not originally intended to be a show about two men masquerading themselves as women.

Bosom Buddies was one of the most unusual sitcoms in television history. The idea behind the show is that two friends, Kip and Henry, are forced to give up their apartment. They can't find housing that they can afford until their friend, Amy, helps them masquerade as women so that they could get a cheap apartment in the hotel for women where Amy lives.

Kip and Henry become Buffy and Hildegard, but also hang out at the hotel as Kip and Henry, pretending to be Buffy and Hildy's brothers. Kip tries to woo Sunny, one of the other women in the hotel.

What makes the show especially unusual is that the two leads are both still successful actors, with one of them being, you know, one of the most famous actors in the world, Tom Hanks. Peter Scolari is no slouch, either! So it's amazing to watch this silly sitcom with two amazing actors starring in it.

The show also had an awesome theme song, using Billy Joel's hit song, "My Life", sung by an uncredited singer (I did a TV Legends Revealed a while back figuring out who the singer was - some people believed it was Hanks himself!)

In any event, the show is famous for the "guys disguised as women" idea, but that was actually not part of the original pitch at all! TV producers Thomas L. Miller and Robert L. Boyett (then part of Miller-Milkis-Boyett before Milkis resigned) explained to Steve Sonksy of the Miami Herald that they pitched the show to ABC as a male version of their hit TV series, Laverne and Shirley...

When describing the show to ABC, they talked about how they were looking for a sophisticated, Billy Wilder-esque style of humor, like Wilder's classic The Apartment (Edie Adams, from The Apartment, was actually one of the original cast members of Bosom Buddies)...

However, when they said "Billy Wilder-esque humor," the network executives didn't get what they were referring to. So the men described some of Wilder's movies, like the classic Some Like It Hot, where Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon play two nightclub performers on the run disguised as women...

The executives loved the idea of the show being about two men pretending to be women, so they approved the show so long as that would be part of the premise and in Hollywood, if you get a "yes" from a network, you don't question it!

And so the show became about two guys pretending to be women...

The second season mostly dropped the disguise elements and it was more of the traditional buddy sitcom that the producers originally planned, but the ratings didn't improve from the middling first season and so it was canceled, despite starring Tom Hanks!! Two seasons for TOM HANKS!

The legend is...

STATUS: True

Thanks to Steve Sonsky for the information!

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