Molly Ringwald Names the Worst Set of Her Career — and It’s the One With 96 Episodes
Molly Ringwald spent part of her August 4 appearance on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen playing a Bravo Clubhouse game that asked her to rank her own sets on a scale of one to ten — and the number she handed out for the worst of them became the story of the night, covered the next morning by The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Variety, People and Entertainment Weekly alike. The low mark went to ABC Family's Secret Life of the American Teenager, the 96-episode hit that ran from 2008 to 2013, which she scored a one: she said she loved the cast and that there was one person on it who was really difficult to work with, declined to say who, and made it clear that single presence was enough to drag the entire experience to the bottom of her list. At the other end of the scale she put Pretty in Pink at a perfect ten, and in between offered a portrait of a career that is far more candid than a retrospective usually gets.
The top of the list is also the most revealing. Pretty in Pink, the 1986 John Hughes classic, was Ringwald's third film with Hughes — after Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club — and she recalled that by then the set felt like family and a well-oiled machine, which is why she rated the experience a ten rather than the movie's finished quality. Two details from that stretch of the conversation matter more than the score itself: Hughes wrote the part for her, and she kept a collage she made about the film in her bedroom, with one exception to her memories of the wardrobe — she did not love the prom dress. She also confirmed what fans have wondered for decades: Pretty in Pink was her last Hughes film, because she and Matthew Broderick were set to make another one with him called Oil and Vinegar that was fully greenlit and then fell apart before production.
The middle of her ranking traced the shape of a working actress rather than an icon. She gave Teaching Mrs. Tingle an eight — not, she said, because the movie itself is great, but because of the cast around her: Katie Holmes early in her career, Helen Mirren, Michael Keaton. Jem and the Holograms got a seven on the strength of simply having fun making it, and the satirical Not Another Teen Movie a flat four. Near the bottom sat the beginning: she rated her time on Diff'rent Strokes and The Facts of Life a two, recalling that she was hired when Facts of Life retooled around four girls, then let go — something she said was hard on a twelve-year-old, a rare early glimpse of how directly her first professional setback anticipated the showbiz childhood she would later portray on screen.
What gives the ranking its weight is that Ringwald, now 58, has spent decades being treated as shorthand for a single era, and this was a chance to hear her sort the work by what the days on set actually felt like rather than by what the films came to mean. The one she called the worst is the one that employed her the longest; the one she called the best is the one that ended her relationship with the director who made her. Even the game's misses are instructive — the Hughes project that never happened would have been a fourth collaboration with a filmmaker who wrote directly for her. Six numbers, six sets, and a straightforward answer to the question the segment was built to ask: for Ringwald, the experience was the point, and the two ends of her scale — a sitcom she was fired from at twelve and a prom movie she never topped — are the ones that still define how the work felt from the inside.
