THE JEFFERSONS DISCO EPISODE

episode title: EVERY NIGHT FEVER year: 1979 cast: Sherman Hemsley, Isabel Sanford rating: ***1/2

Most of THE JEFFERSONS cast, including Isabel Sanford, Roxie Roker, Franklin Cover, Paul Benedict, and even Mike Evans have passed on – and today the patriarch of the long-running series joins them.

George getting down

A show that kept us entertained within a deluxe apartment in the sky. The premise has the black next-door neighbors of white working-class Queens residents Archie and Edith Bunker moving on up to the East Side, New York, thanks to George Jefferson’s successful cleaning business.

Now let’s center on one particular episode – where George, played by the late Sherman Hemsley, gets the “disco bug” after wife Louise suggests they go out for the evening. Always the stubborn mule, George wants nothing to do with frolicking on the dance floor. But the tables turn and he becomes known as “motor hips” at the discothèque.

Louise broods at home, playing scrabble and then auditioning for a “Help Center” play with a snooty director. Here’s where the tables turn back as George gets jealous and quits the nightlife…

And you may be asking: Why memorialize the death of the pint-sized sitcom giant Sherman Hemsley (who continued on five seasons of AMEN) with this particular episode from THE JEFFERSONS season five? No other reason than at 4:00 am, it’s the most entertaining and energetic to watch and it's a pop culture fact that George Jefferson had moves, style, class, brass, and will live on forever… long past disco.

REST IN PEACE SHERMAN HEMSLEY