Critics agree: “Bonnie Franklin and ‘One Day At A Time’ – worst actress and sitcom in history.”

“She was really untalented and I think she may have ruined ten years of network television,” said Sidney Gelman, the president and CEO of PrimeTimeNoTalent Amalgamated from his office in Van Nuys, California.

“When she auditioned for the part of Ann Romano in the Norman Lear show “One Day At A Time”  Norm was looking for an unknown actress, but what he got was an unknowing actress. 

 “She was trying so hard to emote but all that came out was the weird spinning and fist pounding thing that Norman liked.  The rest of the production staff was dumbfounded. 

“They just sat there with their mouth’s open.  Of course Norman mistook this look of horror for a look of awe and admiration and there ya go — Bonnie Franklin was a star.  It wasn’t until the sixth or seventh show that Norman realized what he had done and was quietly paying people to trip Bonnie down the stairs or to put poop from Bangladesh in her food.  

“Bonnie only got diarrhea once and that was probably from something that Nanette Fabray cooked.  Nanette was always bringing in homemade stuff even though she was only on the show a few times.  I know she had poopie hands.  You could tell just by looking at her.  Christ,  she has to be about a hundred years old by now. ”

According to Imaginary Investigators and life partners,  Ben Switchy and Shel Hartunis, numerous attempts to “get rid” of Bonnie failed because she is protected by some kind of guardian spirit — but it is not known if the spirit is an angel or a devil.  

Because she could not be destroyed, the  staff of  “One Day At A Time” eventually had to make the scripts trimmer where Bonnie’s part was concerned.   They started to make special episodes that revolved around her equally untalented TV children, Valerie Bertinelli and MacKenzie Philips.

“The folks over at that show had even gone so far as to write a script dealing with the death of Ann Romano’s character from a stray gang bullet,” said a writer who refused to be identified. 

“We wrote a whole thing and it was about gangs and violence and how the kids dealt with their TV mom’s death.  We even had signed Maryann Mobley to come in as an aunt from Alabama who comes to the funeral and winds up staying to take care of the girls, but no matter how much we tried, Bonnie kept on living and spinning and pounding her fists.  We kept that script handy for three years but we never got to use it.  Finally we had to scrap it when Maryann Mobley started doing Match Game 78. ”

Bonnie Franklin has held the title as worst TV actress ever, but the torch is gradually being passed.  Hollywood insiders believe that the title now will be moved to Tia Leoni, but no official word has been released.

Bonnie Franklin continues to produce and act in plays where she has been very successful since the end of One DayAt A Time, but she will be hard pressed to get another gig like the one she had back in the 70s.  Mackenzie Philips is still busy doing things like carrying heroin onto airplanes and other assorted stuff that requires no particular talent.  Valerie Bertinelli is content to kind of rip people off as an infomercial hostess who hawks junky makeup and junky kitchen devices.  She made it big in television commercials last year when she lost a lot of weight and spoke for weight loss guru ( bullshit artist) Jenny Craig, but even though she lost a lot of weight, she was still 50 and her inner thighs were still flabby — something she tried to hide in the commercials by walking with her legs really close together.