Stream It Or Skip It: ‘227’ On Hulu, The Classic Family Sitcom Starring Marla Gibbs, Regina King And Jackée Harry

227, which just landed on Hulu, is the 1985-90 series that Marla Gibbs starred in after The Jeffersons ended. She plays Mary Jenkins, who lives with her family at 227 Lexington Place in Northeast Washington, DC. There, she tends to gossip on the stoop with her best friend Rose Lee Holloway (Alaina Reed). An older neighbor, leaning out her window and doling out quips, is Pearl Shay (Helen Martin). They have another neighbor in their apartment building, Sandra Clarke (Jackée Harry); Mary and Sandra get into it mainly because Mary disagrees with Sandra’s somewhat liberal attitude towards her love life.

227: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A woman sitting on a milk crate on the stoop of 227 Lexington Place in Northeast Washington, DC. An older woman is leaning out her window.

The Gist: In the first episode aired (the pilot aired as the sixth episode, which happened a lot back in those days), Mary cracks the taillight of a BMW in a parking accident. Rose tells Mary that she should leave a note, but Mary wants to tell her contractor husband Lester (Hal Williams) first. In the meantime, she’s trying to teach her daughter Brenda (Regina King) a lesson about lying about going skating with her crush — and Rose’s grandson — Calvin Dobbs (Curtis Baldwin).

She finally leaves the note, but the car soon gets smashed by a hit-and-run driver, possibly leaving her on the hook for all the repairs. Sandra, eyeing the handsome man who drives the luxury car, hatches a plan: She’ll pose as Mary and convince him that she’s only responsible for the tail light. If Sandra gets a date out of the deal, so be it.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? 227 was based on a play by Christine Houston, about the people in an apartment building in Chicago in the 1950s. As far as sitcoms go, 227 more or less followed the formula of a lot of family sitcoms of the era. Think of Gibbs’ Jeffersons character Florence transplanted to a middle class neighborhood in DC and you get the idea.

Our Take: We watched the first few seasons of 227, mainly because it aired in the same Saturday NBC lineup as another series that also debuted on September 14, 1985: A little show called The Golden Girls. As a 14-year-old who didn’t have anywhere to go on Saturday nights (which kind of stinks but set us up well for what we do now), we liked 227 well enough.

Was it revolutionary? After the success of The Cosby Show the year before, which showed an upper-class Black family, 227 was a good vehicle to show Black families in a middle-class setting, so it was revolutionary in that way. But even 37 years ago, the format of the show itself didn’t seem all that new. Marry deals out the gossip, banters with Sandra, makes sure dinner is on the table for Hal and Brenda. Rose is a single mother who ends up owning the building when the owner dies and rewards her kindness. Pearl is an old lady who talks about sex.

The revelation was Jackée Harry as Sandra. Yes, she was portrayed as a trollop who seemed to wear revealing clothing, when she was merely sexually active and wore bright, fashionable clothes. Looking at her character through 2022 eyes, she was actually independent, fierce, and highly intelligent, and Harry portrayed her that way from Day 1. There’s a reason why Sandra became the show’s breakout character; Harry took what could have been a standard sitcom “neighbor of questionable repute” and made her into a force of nature. It was surprising to us how complete the character was from the start; there were even signs that she sometimes got along with Mary.

Watching a few episodes — including the two-part pilot, which actually aired as episodes 6 and 7 — what becomes apparent is the idea of Mary as a gossipy housewife who is concerned about what her husband would say about a parking accident felt like a musty model even back in 1985. In a sitcom world where marriages were starting to be shown more as partnerships, and women were being shown to be independent and sexual on shows like The Golden Girls, having Gibbs play a wisecracking but seemingly subservient housewife seemed to be a backwards move. It feels even more retrograde now.

As the show’s five seasons went along, that dynamic changed a bit; it had to as we entered the ’90s. But it does feel like the last vestiges of an era where sitcom marriages were seen a particular way.

Of course, people have fond memories of 227, so much so that people still think of Regina King as young Brenda, despite all of the Oscars and Emmys and amazing roles she’s played over the last thirty years. During the first season, King was your basic sitcom kid; as she got older, some of the more subtle acting skills we’d see from her as an adult would come out as she played Brenda and got more involved with Calvin. But it’s still fun to see the very beginnings of such a remarkable career play out in a show that got so much exposure (its first two seasons, the show was in the top-20 of the Nielsen ratings).

Sex and Skin: None. Even Sandra’s mode of dress in that first season was not nearly as revealing as we remembered it was.

Parting Shot: The misunderstanding about the parking accident is fixed, and Mary admits to Brenda that she should be more careful practicing what she preaches. Then Brenda asks if the pie they had with the car’s owner is Rose’s pie, Mary says “I’m going to leave Mr. Grant a note, dear,” and everyone laughs.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Kia Goodwin as Rose’s daughter Tiffany. Not that she did anything special when we saw her on screen, but in the grand tradition of classic sitcoms, the character disappeared when Goodwin was let out of her contract, only to appear occasionally after the first season.

Most Pilot-y Line: “Give me five more minutes, and I’ll have him paying your rent,” Sandra says when Mary wants to call off the ruse with the BMW driver. That line certainly wouldn’t fly today, would it?

Our Call: STREAM IT. Has 227 aged well? Not really. But most network sitcoms from the ’80s haven’t; there’s too many quips and mugging for funny lines and not enough character development. And 227 had a lot of that. But it also had a fully-formed feeling that a lot of network sitcoms of the era didn’t have when they debuted, and a breakout character for the ages.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.