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The Haircut That Changed Home Again
How a quiet ABC family sitcom turned its most conventional character into its boldest one.
Originally published in The A.V. Club, April 2023
By Adrian Navarro
There is a moment in the fourteenth episode of Home Again’s fourth season — broadcast on a Tuesday night in March 1990, sandwiched between a rerun of Who’s the Boss? and the local news — that viewers who saw it remember with disproportionate clarity. Not because anything dramatic happened in the usual sense. No one died. No secret was revealed. The episode did not even finish especially high in the Nielsen overnights. And yet people who followed the show through its later years will often tell you, unprompted, that they remember exactly where they were when Karen Davis came home from the hairdresser.
Home Again ran on ABC from the fall of 1986 through the spring of 1991. It was never the network’s flagship. It did not have the breakout ratings of Family Ties or the cultural force of Roseanne, which premiered two years later and promptly redrew the map of what an American family sitcom could be. What Home Again had instead was a particular kind of solidity: consistency of tone, reliable warmth, and a cast that seemed, week after week, to genuinely like one another. Critics noticed this. Audiences felt it without necessarily being able to articulate why. The show ran for five seasons not because it dazzled, but because it was trusted.
The Davis family lived in a comfortable suburban house somewhere on the outskirts of Cincinnati — the kind of neighbourhood the show’s establishing shots suggested without ever quite specifying. Richard Davis, Karen’s husband, was a literature professor at the local university: tall, slightly distracted, with wire-rimmed glasses and a tendency to quote things at moments when no one had asked him to. Their daughter Jennifer, fifteen when the series began, was the kind of teenager family sitcoms of the period knew exactly how to use — bright, impatient, and aware in the particular way of a pretty girl who suspects the world is larger than her current ZIP code. Then there was Michael, eight years old, gap-toothed and freckled, asking the sort of questions that made adults look at one another over his head.
At the centre of it all was Karen Davis, the family’s mother, played by Diane Mercer in what remains by some distance the defining role of her career. Mercer was thirty-one when Home Again premiered — warm-featured, softly attractive, and blonde in the full, carefully maintained way television liked its mothers to be blonde. Karen had been conceived, by all accounts, less as a protagonist than as stabilising architecture — someone to absorb the emotional fallout of her children’s storylines, keep the household legible, and supply the measured, practical warmth television had been assigning to mothers since at least the days of The Donna Reed Show. She was, in the early seasons, a recognisable type: the capable housewife who had chosen that life deliberately, who had worked before the children came and had decided, without apparent regret, that she would rather be home. In almost every visible respect, she was exactly what the show needed her to be.
Almost. Because Karen Davis, more often than not, could be found padding around the house barefoot — no shoes, and no socks either. It was Mercer’s own idea — a small naturalistic detail she introduced early in the first season, and one the producers, after some hesitation, decided to keep. It was a quiet thing, barely noticeable at first, the kind of detail that registers somewhere below conscious attention. The show acknowledged it only once, briefly, when her husband glanced down before a neighbour’s dinner party and said, with the weary affection of a man who had clearly lost this argument many times before, “Karen, please — can you put on some shoes? Just once in your life.”
But it is not the detail people mean when they talk about Diane Mercer and Home Again. What they mean is the haircut.
The setup, in isolation, sounds like the premise of a dozen other sitcom episodes from the same era. Karen Davis, nervous and uncertain after years as a full-time homemaker, has decided to return to work. She has a background in commercial interior design — a fact established in the second season and not much revisited since — and a former colleague has offered her a part-time consultancy that could become something more substantial if she wants it to. The problem, as Karen explains to her neighbour and best friend Nancy Doyle in the episode’s first act, is not competence. It is presentation. After years of school runs, grocery stores and parent-teacher evenings, she is no longer sure she looks like someone who belongs in a client meeting. In one sense, she looks exactly as she always has: the same full, carefully set blonde hair she has worn since the pilot, a softly waved, heavily styled look that by 1990 was already beginning to feel like a relic of the previous decade.
Nancy, played with impeccable comic timing by Judith Farrell in what was then her fourth season of recurring appearances on the show, has a simple solution. They will go to the salon together. A good cut, maybe some highlights. Nothing dramatic. Just enough to make Karen feel like herself again — or, Nancy adds, with the slightly dangerous brightness that had become her character’s signature, “like a better version of yourself.” Karen, visibly uncertain, agrees.
The salon scene itself lasts less than three minutes and is constructed with the kind of precision sitcoms once did very well. Karen sits in the chair, cape around her shoulders, talking to a young stylist in black while Nancy, at the far end of the room, has her own ends trimmed and contributes unhelpful opinions from behind a magazine. Karen says she wants something professional. Then perhaps something sharper. Then not too short. Then maybe a little shorter. The stylist has suggestions; Karen is unsure about those as well. Nancy calls something out that only makes matters worse. Finally, Karen drops her hands into her lap and says, with the exhausted surrender of someone who has argued herself in and out of the same decision too many times, “You know what — just do whatever you want. I trust you.” The stylist smiles. It is not an entirely reassuring smile. The episode cuts away.
When it returns, Nancy is finished: neat, unchanged, exactly as expected. She crosses the salon looking for Karen. She finds her. We do not see Karen yet. We see Nancy’s face, and that is enough. But the show makes the audience wait. The reveal does not happen in the salon. It happens at home. Karen steps into the living room doorway and the camera holds on her from behind — just long enough to establish that something has changed. The family sees her before we do.
The production had arranged for an actual haircut, scheduled during a two-week hiatus between taping blocks. Mercer later recalled, in a 1991 interview with TV Guide, that the decision had come gradually — through a series of conversations with the show’s producers and her own hairdresser, over the course of several weeks. “I was terrified, honestly. I’d never had short hair — not once in my life. And I’d always been a little vain about my hair. But the producers were convinced it was right for Karen, and we kept talking about it, and after a while I just thought: well, maybe they’re right.”
What she returned from that hiatus with was a short crop — a very short crop. The sides and nape had been clipped close to the skin, close enough that the paleness of her scalp showed through. The top was left slightly longer and swept up and back into a high, angular pompadour. The big, carefully styled blonde hair Karen Davis had worn since the pilot was simply gone. Not trimmed. Not reshaped. Gone. In its place was something the show had never prepared the viewer to see: a look with more in common with the severe edge of late-eighties pop iconography than with anything usually permitted to a mother on an American family sitcom.
The scene that followed — the family’s reaction — was shot twice. The first take, according to the show’s long-serving director Alan Pryce, was too restrained. “The kids just stared, incredulous,” he recalled in a 2004 retrospective piece for the Los Angeles Times. “Which was real, but it wasn’t the scene.” The second take found the register the writers had been looking for: Jennifer’s sharp intake of breath and her hand flying to her mouth — “Mom, your hair” — barely audible over the studio audience; Michael asking, with perfect twelve-year-old solemnity, whether she was really their mother; and Richard’s extended silence, which began as shock and shaded, slowly, just far enough into comedy to save him. And in the middle of it all stood Karen — hands slightly raised, head newly shorn, blinking once in the direction of her family.
The audience at the taping, Pryce noted, laughed loudest not at the haircut itself but at her expression: stunned, a little lost, and plainly not yet sure what she thought of it.
What no one quite planned for was what came next. The haircut, which had been conceived as a single-episode story beat, did not go away. Partly this was because Mercer herself preferred the shorter length and made clear she had no interest in growing it back for the cameras. Partly it was because the audience, which producers had braced to be resistant, turned out not to be resistant at all. Letters in the weeks that followed were almost uniformly positive. More significantly, several described the change in terms that surprised the production team: not simply as a comic event, but as a look that seemed, almost immediately, to fit Karen better than her old one had.
When the fifth and final season began, Karen Davis’s hair was already shorter than it had been at the end of the fourth. The cut had evolved into what was often described at the time as a modified flattop: clipped close at the sides and nape, flat and exacting on top, unmistakably masculine in a way that had no real precedent on an ABC family comedy. It was, by any measure, a man’s haircut. On a suburban mother of two. On a Tuesday night.
The show acknowledged this with a handful of running jokes, gentle and slightly self-aware. In one episode Karen offers, with perfect composure, to take Michael to the barber because his hair is getting too long. “Oh, sweetie — why not something like mine? You’d look so handsome.” Michael’s horrified response — “Mom. No. Not a chance. Not ever.” — drew a laugh that surprised even the cast. In another episode, Richard confides to a colleague at the university that he can no longer pick Karen out in a crowd: he still finds himself looking for the blonde hair, and it simply is not there. The colleague asks whether that is a problem. Richard thinks about it for a moment. “Well — no,” he says, with the slightly surprised expression of a man discovering something about himself. “That’s the strange part.” And Jennifer, furious after Karen refuses to let her go to a party with some university boys, delivers one of the season’s most quoted lines when she tells her friends, with the particular venom only a teenage girl can summon, that her mother is “basically a drill sergeant — she even has the haircut.” None of it was mean-spirited. All of it landed.
What was landing less comfortably, apparently, was the situation at the network. According to more than one person present at the time, a senior executive watching the fifth-season dailies picked up the phone mid-reel and said, with the strained exasperation of a man who had been hoping this was only a phase, “Please stop cutting her hair. She’s the mother on a family comedy, for God’s sake. We cannot have her looking like that.”
A memo followed. In the careful language of network television, it suggested that the production consider “stabilising” Karen Davis’s appearance for the remainder of the season. The production considered it, and then more or less ignored it. By that point Diane Mercer had taken to the shorter look with such visible conviction — and with so little interest in retreating from it — that there was little sense in pretending otherwise.
The actor who played Richard, Greg Paulson, spoke warmly about the whole arc in later interviews. “I won’t lie — at first I thought it was a terrible idea,” he said on a podcast in 2017. “And then she walked onto the set with the new hair and I thought: oh. Well. Maybe not so terrible.” In the same conversation, he was more expansive. “We’d sit next to each other in the makeup room every morning — she’d be getting clipped, I’d be getting a blow-dry. At some point that started to feel ridiculous. I mean, I was supposed to be the father of the family. She was the mother. And she had less hair than me. Considerably less.” He paused. “Diane thought this was very funny. I came around eventually.”
The episode itself — “A New Look,” season four, episode fourteen — is not difficult to find now. It streams on two platforms and resurfaces regularly in online discussions about family sitcoms of the period, and, occasionally, about those moments when mainstream American television seemed briefly to surprise itself. People who were children when it first aired still describe the experience in terms that carry a trace of the original shock: Karen Davis had seemed exactly the sort of mother one could never imagine shorn at all, and then there she was. And they were not alone in noticing. In the days that followed the broadcast, the episode generated exactly the kind of water-cooler conversation network television still knew how to produce in early 1990: in offices, school hallways, neighbourhood driveways. The entertainment press picked it up. People ran a brief item; Entertainment Tonight covered it; several television critics who had never previously mentioned Home Again found themselves writing about it.
Home Again was cancelled in the spring of 1991, which was the fate of a great many competent, lightly loved network series as the decade turned: shows that had served their audiences faithfully for years, occupied their timeslots without embarrassment, and were dropped with minimal sentiment once the ratings no longer justified the space they took up. There was no special finale, no farewell campaign, no sense of institutional mourning. The network did not so much end the show as quietly cease to require it. It simply disappeared from the schedule, as these things often did.
Karen Davis was, by any reasonable measure, the role that made Diane Mercer’s name. Whatever she did afterwards — and she continued to work steadily for years — it was Karen people remembered: Karen barefoot in the kitchen, Karen keeping the household in motion, and then coming through the front door with half her hair suddenly gone. Mercer herself would later describe Home Again as the show that changed her life — and, more than once, the way she looked.
In a 2022 appearance on the podcast Inside the Box: The TV History Podcast, Mercer was candid about what the haircut had come to mean to her. “It was liberating in a way I genuinely hadn’t anticipated. Women would come up to me in the supermarket, in the street, and say they loved it, that it suited me. Which was flattering, but also a little strange — because by that point I barely had any hair left.” When the interviewer observed that it had been a radical thing to do on network television, especially while playing the mother on a family sitcom, Mercer considered this for a moment. “I suppose it was, yes. Especially then.”
In the same podcast, she described what happened next. The show had ended. The contract was over. There was no one left to answer to. And so, one evening at home, she asked her husband at the time to shave her head. “I know, I know — there wasn’t any grand reason for it. I just wanted to. He sat me down in the bathroom, took a razor to it, and shaved me right down to the skin.” A pause. “I’d been thinking about it for a while, if I’m honest.”
There are photographs from that period — most famously from the November 1991 premiere of The Long Way Home, a modest film Mercer had shot in the months immediately after Home Again wrapped. In the film she wore a wig. At the premiere she did not. “I had a small part in that one,” she said. “Filmed it right after we wrapped. And then they had a premiere, so I went along. And yes — I was completely bald. Had a lovely evening, actually. Just turned up with my chrome dome.”
Mercer went on to say that she had been tempted, more than once, to do it again. “I do miss it, sometimes,” she said. “There’s a simplicity to being bald that I hadn’t expected.” But she had let it grow back, and time had passed, and she had a different husband now — one who, she noted, was not especially enthusiastic about the idea. “He’s very attached to my hair as it currently is,” she said, then laughed. “Better not upset the man. Though I’m sure Karen Davis would have approved.”
And perhaps she would have. The final irony was that ABC’s effort to “stabilise” its soft-blonde television mother did not end with Karen restored, but with Diane Mercer herself entirely bald — by that point, less a sitcom housewife than Kojak.
Adrian Navarro is a contributor to The A.V. Club.
