Gimme a Break!
American television sitcom
Gimme a Break! is an American television sitcom created by Mort Lachman and Sy Rosen that aired on NBC for six seasons from October 29, 1981, to May 12, 1987. The series starred Nell Carter as the housekeeper for a widowed police chief (Dolph Sweet) and his three daughters.
Premise
In Glenlawn, a fictional suburb in California, Nellie Ruth "Nell" Harper (Nell Carter) agrees to look after the Kanisky household as a special favor to her dying friend Margaret Huffman Kanisky (played in flashback by Sharon Spelman), the wife of police chief Carl Kanisky (Dolph Sweet). More than a mere housekeeper and cook, Nell serves as a parental figure to the chief's three teenaged daughters, Katie (Kari Michaelsen), Julie (Lauri Hendler), and Samantha (Lara Jill Miller). A foster son, Joey (Joey Lawrence), joins the Kanisky household in season three.
Five episodes into the sixth and final season, the show changed locales from Glenlawn to New York City, when Nell, concerned for Joey's welfare after he moved there with his absentee father, traveled there to check on him. She subsequently assumed guardianship of Joey and his younger brother Matthew (played by Joey Lawrence's real-life brother Matthew Lawrence) at their father's request, and was forced to permanently relocate there after Chief Kanisky's father Stanley (John Hoyt) sold the family's Glenlawn home.
Over the six-year run, celebrities often appeared on the show, including singers Whitney Houston, Andy Gibb, Sammy Davis Jr., Ray Parker Jr., and The Pointer Sisters. More often than not, the guest singers would perform a song with Nell on the episodes.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Gimme a Break!” is american television sitcom. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Gimme, Break and American, not as a finished interpretation.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2056556. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1981 and 1987.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gimme a Break!” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.