For nine seasons, Alice brought the everyday chaos of a roadside diner in Phoenix, Arizona, into American living rooms. Built around waitresses, short-order cooks, regular customers, bad tips, broken romances, and dreams of something better, the series became one of the most recognizable workplace comedies of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Premiering on CBS in 1976, Alice was loosely based on Martin Scorsese’s 1974 film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. The movie starred Ellen Burstyn as Alice Hyatt, a recently widowed mother traveling west with her young son while hoping to restart her singing career. When money runs short, she takes a job as a waitress in Arizona. Burstyn won the Academy Award for Best Actress for the role, and the film’s success provided the foundation for a considerably lighter television adaptation.
Linda Lavin took over the title role for television. The series begins with Alice and her son Tommy leaving New Jersey after the death of her husband and heading toward California, where she hopes to pursue her dream of becoming a professional singer. They make it as far as Phoenix before financial necessity forces Alice to take a job at Mel’s Diner. What is supposed to be a temporary stop gradually becomes a new life.
Mel’s was presided over by its gruff, stingy, and frequently exasperated owner and cook, Mel Sharples, played by Vic Tayback. Tayback had also played Mel in the original film and was the only principal performer to reprise his role for the television series. With his paper cook’s hat, mustache, and permanently irritated demeanor, Mel became one of the show’s defining characters.
The original diner crew also included Beth Howland as the sweet, somewhat scatterbrained Vera Gorman and Polly Holliday as Florence Jean “Flo” Castleberry, a wisecracking Southern waitress who rarely missed an opportunity to put Mel—or an obnoxious customer—in his place. Flo became the show’s breakout character, particularly through her signature dismissal, “Kiss my grits!” The catchphrase became a genuine piece of late-1970s pop culture.
Holliday eventually left Alice in 1980 to star in the spin-off Flo. Her departure began a series of changes behind the counter at Mel’s. Diane Ladd, who had played Flo in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, joined the television series as the sharp-tongued Belle Dupree. After Belle departed, Celia Weston arrived as Jolene Hunnicutt, another spirited Southern waitress who remained a regular through the show’s later years.
Although Alice was primarily a comedy, its working-class setting gave the show room to deal with subjects beyond the usual sitcom misunderstandings. Episodes touched on single parenthood, dating, divorce, money problems, workplace conflicts, aging, unemployment and the struggle to improve one’s circumstances. Alice remained determined to become a singer even as the demands of work and motherhood repeatedly interfered with those ambitions.
That blue-collar atmosphere was a major part of the program’s appeal. Mel’s wasn’t an upscale television workplace populated by glamorous professionals. It was a greasy spoon where people punched a clock, worried about their bills, and occasionally dreamed about getting out. The employees constantly argued with one another, but beneath the insults and bickering they gradually became a makeshift family.
Phoenix itself was another important part of the show’s identity. The familiar exterior of Mel’s Diner was a real building on Grand Avenue in Phoenix, although the television interiors were created on studio sets in California. The distinctive diner exterior became so closely associated with Alice that it remains recognizable to fans decades later.
Alice debuted on August 31, 1976, and remained on CBS until March 19, 1985, ultimately producing more than 200 episodes. Its long run carried it across a changing era of American television, from the socially conscious sitcoms of the 1970s into the increasingly polished network comedies of the mid-1980s.
What has kept Alice memorable, however, isn’t simply nostalgia or “Kiss my grits.” At its center was a straightforward story about starting over. Alice Hyatt arrived in Phoenix expecting it to be a temporary setback on her way to somewhere else. Instead, Mel’s Diner became the place where she raised her son, built friendships, and created a second home. That mixture of aspiration, frustration, and working-class humor gave Alice a warmth that helped keep the lights on at Mel’s for nearly a decade.
