Molly Ringwald Played A Blind Woman On AMC's First Scripted Original Series

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In 1996, Molly Ringwald guest-starred on the AMC sitcom "Remember WENN." The show was about a fictional Pittsburgh radio station in the late 1930s, and it ran for four seasons and 56 episodes. Ringwald, who had recently returned to the world of TV with the 1994 ABC miniseries "The Stand," starred in the show's fifth episode, "Sight Unseen," in which she played a blind woman named Angela Colton. 

Ringwald's favorite part of the role was that she got to base it off her own vision-impaired father. As she told Knight-Ridder Newspapers at the time, "When [my father] was a young man, no one knew he was blind ... He didn't really have all the mannerisms of a blind person, so if he was without his cane or his guide dog, no one could tell." Ringwald's character was the same way, and the episode mined a lot of comedy out of other characters not instantly picking up on her disability. 

"I can't wait for him to see it," Ringwald said about her father. She noted that while her mother would have to explain "certain sight gags" to him, she still thought her father would enjoy her performance. It helped that the show itself was based around a radio show, and her father always loved radio.

"Remember WENN" was AMC's first ever original scripted TV series. Unfortunately, it wasn't treated as well as the channel's later hits. Whereas, say, "The Walking Dead" would go on for eleven seasons and branch off into several spinoffs, "Remember WENN" was canceled by AMC after four seasons — despite having become something of a critical darling.  

AMC's senior vice president of original programming told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that their plan was to "develop other shows as good as or hopefully better than 'Remember WENN.'" He said in another statement, "While 'Remember WENN' has been a tremendous success on many levels, it has not generated the kind of audience required to make the show viable."

This explanation frustrated the show's fans, who launched (to no avail) one of the first online campaigns to convince a network to uncancel a series. Less than 15 years later, AMC would become a prestige TV powerhouse with "Breaking Bad" and "Mad Men" both airing at the same time; "Remember WENN," unfortunately, premiered when original scripted TV shows seemed not to be high on AMC's list of priorities.