Joyce DeWitt’s Quiet Truth About the Show That Never Really Ended

Three’s Company wasn’t supposed to become a phenomenon. Three roommates, a lot of mistaken assumptions, and comic timing that still lands decades later   that was the formula. Between John Ritter’s physical comedy and Suzanne Somers’ star turn, the show carved out a permanent place in television history. Even now, the opening shots of the Santa Monica Pier feel like a postcard from another era.

Ritter and Somers are both gone. But Joyce DeWitt, now 75, is still here   and still talking about what that show actually meant to people.

She’s said that some of the most moving moments of her career came later, from grown adults telling her the show had been their refuge growing up   sometimes the only one they had.

DeWitt played Janet Wood for 171 episodes, from 1976 to 1984, and became something like a permanent fixture in American living rooms. Looking back, she’s described the show as almost old-fashioned in structure   chaos and mistaken identity dressed up in a modern setting, closer to a centuries-old stage farce than she ever expected to be part of. The jokes were the point. But underneath, she’s said, the writers weren’t afraid to touch real issues.

Ritter used to say the real goal wasn’t just laughter   it was getting people to lose it completely. DeWitt has always maintained, though, that what actually kept viewers coming back wasn’t the jokes at all. It was the warmth between the characters. The friendship underneath the slapstick.

The Feud Nobody Saw Coming

Behind the cameras, things weren’t nearly as light. Somers, cast as television’s ditzy blonde, was quietly building a case for equal pay   and when she asked for a raise that would take her from $30,000 to $150,000 an episode, the fallout was immediate. It fractured her relationships with the cast, DeWitt included.

The studio didn’t renew her the way she wanted. Instead, she finished out the season sidelined   filming her remaining scenes apart from the rest of the cast, delivering her lines over the phone, with security present.

What followed was thirty years of total silence between her and DeWitt.

Somers later said the narrative at the time cast her as the one trying to sabotage the show  and that afterward, she simply cut contact with everyone involved, permanently.

Some assumed DeWitt had a hand in pushing her out. In reality, it came down to money  and to two very different people wanting different things from their careers. Somers was a single mother who needed financial security. DeWitt was focused purely on the work itself.

DeWitt has since acknowledged the gap between them plainly: their needs simply weren’t the same. She didn’t have a child depending on her income, and by her own admission, she never had the business instincts Somers did.

A Reunion, Decades Later

In 2012, the silence finally broke. Somers invited DeWitt onto her talk show, and the two women faced each other again for the first time in thirty years. What followed was raw   an embrace, an honest conversation, and the quiet end of a rift that had outlasted the show itself.

DeWitt told her, on air, that she’d been up against something brutal in that industry  and that everything she’d built since was extraordinary.

The two stayed close after that, up until Somers passed away in 2023 following a battle with breast cancer. DeWitt has spoken about both of her former castmates with real tenderness since  Somers as someone truly remarkable, Ritter as an irreplaceable gift in her life.

What’s Left Behind

The old photos from the set still capture something the tension never erased  genuine closeness between three people who liked each other. DeWitt and Somers broke ground as women in an industry that wasn’t built for them, standing as essential to the show’s success as Ritter was.

Decades of complicated history aside, Three’s Company endures not just because it was funny, but because of what was real underneath it.