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Where 'Welcome Back, Kotter' at first wasn't welcome - CNN
Aug 01, 2021 49 secs
Watch CNN Original Series "History of the Sitcom" on Sundays at 9 p.m.

By September 1975, Boston's ABC station, WCVB, feared that "Welcome Back, Kotter" in prime time would make an already violent situation worse.

Set in Brooklyn, "Welcome Back, Kotter" starred comedian Gabe Kaplan as "Gabe Kotter," a teacher who returns to his alma mater and leads a multiracial class of wise-cracking troublemakers known as the Sweathogs.

"'Welcome Back, Kotter' was not trying to make a statement about integration," co-star Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs says in a bonus scene from CNN Original Series "History of the Sitcom." "It just showed you it as a norm."

But it was far enough from the norm in Boston to put the ABC station's leadership on edge.

"Suddenly ABC attracted this audience that had been so underserved by prime time TV," Variety TV editor Michael Schneider explains in "History of the Sitcom." "The kids, the teens, the young people -- ('Kotter' showed) there's room for them, for a new kind of show."

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