After Diff'rent Strokes: When the Laughter Stopped

I thought I had seen this before, but turns out I had seen the other Diff'rent Strokes TV biopic. Yes, Hollywood felt this story required two diff'rent tellings. This is easily the sleaziest of the two, rushed out within a year of Dana Plato's death and only runs an hour. This thing is so damn exploitative that they have their Dana (Elise Horn) narrating the story from the grave as it chronicles the lows the teenage cast went through in the thirteen years after their show ended. One scene involves Gary Coleman (Alon Williams) being told by a forensic accountant that his parents have been stealing from him and he goes, "Whatchutalkin' bout?" They even work in a fake Howard Stern for Plato's last interview. But by far the most audacious and shameless thing the production does though is give Todd Bridges a cameo as a drug dealer who sells crack to the onscreen Willis (Corey Mendell Parker)! It almost all makes sense when you realize the script was co-written by Matthew Bright (Freeway, Shrunken Heads). Fox aired it in May 2000 as a double feature with an hour-long "unauthorized" look at The Brady Bunch, which has to be network television's biggest tabloid undertaking since they unleashed two Roseanne Barr biopics in the 1994.