In a surprising--for the time--gender role reversal, ABC debuted Who's the Boss?, a sitcom about a career woman who hires a macho Italian-American to be her housekeeper. The show was a big success and ran for eight seasons before retiring.

Tony Danza played Tony Micelli, an ex-baseball player who lived in Brooklyn with his daughter, Samantha (played by Alyssa Milano). Tony's wife had died and the widowed father felt increasingly uneasy about raising his child in the mean streets of Brooklyn with no feminine influence to balance out Sam's tomboy tendencies. Tony accepted a job in upscale, picturesque Fairfield, Connecticut, keeping house for Angela Bower (played by Judith Light), a divorced advertising executive.

Angela had her own family problems that she had to juggle alongside her busy job. Her son, Jonathan, was shy and a little geeky; her mother, Mona, lived in a guesthouse next to the main house and her wild, man-hungry ways often drove conservative Angela crazy. After some initial reservations about Tony's ability to handle the job, the Micellis and the Bowers got together.

The arrangement worked better than anyone had hoped. Tony's laid-back, down-to-earth attitude relaxed the wound-up Angela and he also provided fatherly direction for little Jonathan. Sam grew up in more sophisticated environs with Angela as a strong female role model and Mona's dubiously valuable advice on life and romance. Though Tony and Angela occasionally dated other people during the show's run, there was romantic tension aplenty between them, keeping viewers hooked with the 'will they or won't they?' premise.

They did eventually, after eight long seasons of friendship and tip-toeing around each other. Tony and Angela had a whirlwind romance but the series didn't end with marriage, but with Tony's graduation from college which he had attended as an adult student.

Who's the Boss? was incredibly successful and has become part of pop culture lore. It gave rise to two short-lived spin-offs, Charmed Lives and Living Dolls.