While we often talk about how great the 1990s were for television — especially for comedy — the truth is that the 1980s were pretty great, too. The decade gave us a lot of hilarious and now-conic series like Growing Pains, The Golden Girls, Perfect Strangers, ALF, Night Court, and so many more. There were even some great sitcoms of the time period that we consider to be from the ‘90s but actually got their start in the 1980s, like Seinfeld, further cementing how great television was for the time. Now, one of the best of those 1980s sitcoms is headed to Prime Video this month.
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All eight seasons of Who’s the Boss? is headed to Prime Video on March 25th. The series originally debuted on ABC in 1984 and ultimately ran for 196 episodes before concluding in 1992. The series offered a humorous take on a gender role reversal modern family dynamic as it followed Tony Micelli (Tony Danza), a former baseball player who relocates from New York City to Fairfield, Connecticut to raise his daughter while he works as a live-in housekeeper for Angela Bower (Judith LIght0, a single advertising executive with a young son. The series also starred Alyissa Milano as Tony’s daughter Samantha, Danny Pintauro as Angela’s son Jonathan, and Katherine Helmond as Angela’s mom, Mona. The series was one of the most popular sitcoms of the 1980s and was nominated for numerous Emmy and Golden Globe Awards during its run.
Who’s the Boss? Offered a Unique Take on Family for the Time (and We Still Want the Cancelled Reboot)
Part of what made Who’s the Boss? such a great series and contributed to its popularity is that the series offered a look at a different kind of family dynamic than what most sitcoms of the era were offering. While the general concept of a nuclear family — mother, father, kids — was intact superficially, this was not your standard family. Tony and Sam Micelli weren’t a part of the Bower family properly since Tony was technically Angela’s employee. Angela, for her part, was a successful working single mother, something that you didn’t see that much of on television in the 1980s. Even when Tony entered the picture as the “man of the house” after Angela hired him on, she remained the breadwinner, leaving Tony to handle domestic issues.
This setup was a challenge to the contemporary stereotypes of what a household should be and also offered up a fresh, more diverse view of what “being a man” looked like. While the series does eventually pair Angela and Tony romantically, it takes them most of the series for that to happen and instead builds the series more on their friendship than anything else, another element that subverted norms for the time. It made for a unique series, and one that fans really responded to. Even decades later, Who’s the Boss? continued to have such a place of esteem and appreciation with audiences that a reboot or sequel series was planned that would have seen Danza and Milano return as Tony and Samantha Micelli. The series was expected to go on Amazon Freevee but was ultimately passed on. Freevee itself was discontinued in September 2025.
While there were plans to shop the reboot of Who’s the Boss? around, nothing ever came from it, which is a shame. Given that the series was so unique for its time and concluded in a somewhat ambiguous fashion — exactly where Tony and Angela’s relationship ends up was left open without marriage as it was determined at the time keeping things open ended would be better for syndication — it would be interesting to see what the “future” held for the couple as well as the rest of the Micelli-Bower family. It would have also been interesting to see how the concept played out with a new generation of audiences, but sadly that did not come to pass. Instead, fans will just have to settle for streaming the entirety of the original series on Prime Video when it arrives March 25th.
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