The Nanny Foreshadowed Fran Drescher’s Norma Rae Moment Nearly Three Decades Ago — Watch

Andy Swift
·2 min read
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If you had polled the opening night audience of The Beautician and the Beast back in 1997, few moviegoers would have predicted that Fran Drescher — let alone President Drescher — would someday draw praise for a fiery, televised speech about the plight of the American worker and the dangers of intelligent machines.

It’s a scenario that even a dystopian edition of Mad Libs would have deemed too random.

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Yet that’s exactly what happened on Thursday when Drescher, in a speech that’s going viral for both its powerful words and dramatic delivery, announced that SAG-AFTRA is officially on strike.

In addition to being riveting television, the speech also left me with a strange sense of pop-cultural deja vu. Like when the college cheating scandal happened, and I remembered that both Felicity Huffman (via Desperate Housewives) and Lori Loughlin (via Full House) played characters who also lied to get their children into prestigious schools. Had I… seen this before?

Following an almost entirely misspelled Google search, my suspicions were confirmed.

A 1994 episode of The Nanny, fittingly titled “The Strike,” found Fran refusing to cross a picket line of striking busboys outside the hotel where Mr. Sheffield was hosting the premiere party for his latest Broadway flop. (Ironically, the production was a musical based on the life of pro-union icon Norma Rae.)

When a print newspaper photographer caught Mr. Sheffield trying to pull his reluctant nanny across the picket line, the duo became the faces of the movement overnight, with her representing the hardworking underdogs and him standing for the out-of-touch CEOs.

As a reminder that this episode was produced 29 years ago, Fran and Mr. Sheffield were then interviewed by special guest star Sally Jesse Raphael (!), who determined that their issues had less to do with their opposing views on unions and more to do with their troublingly sexual workplace dynamic — which is pretty much what every episode of The Nanny boiled down to, let’s be real.

Now for the good news: the bizarre TV appearance drew national attention to the strike, which in turn forced the hotel to settle with the busboys. Victory!

I guess what this whole experience taught me is that if there’s anyone capable of mediating the negotiations necessary to bring these strikes to an end… it’s probably Sally Jesse Raphael.

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