Many fans naturally ask what Small Wonder would've been like had it
launched a fifth season. In fact, had season four followed through with
intentions paved since Home Sweet Sale, the subsequent season
would've not only brought a maturer and wittier show, but very well spawned a
spin-off series, Too Good To Be True, revolving around the adventures
of Vicki's more advanced but impetuous twin, Vanessa (see The Bad Seedling and Hooray For Hollyweird).
The original TGTBT Small Wonder season five opener script brought together the Lawson and Anderson grandparents for Vicki's 13th birthday, a day after a terrified and exasperated Joan demands that Ted scrap impetuous Vanessa permanently after her third try living with the Lawsons when Vanessa almost throws Jamie out the window for foolishly ordering her to clean his room. While salvaging Vanessa's advanced parts to upgrade Vicki in the garage Ted briefly leaves, wherein Harriet enters and stupidly switches around Vanessa's and Vicki's memory modules on the workbench. Her innate impudence merging with Vicki's basic docility, Vanessa awakens in Vicki's body and slyly keeps mum about it until Vicki's birthday party, when she suddenly tears "her" pinafore off a miniskirt underneath and declares she's starting "a whole new style," beginning with demanding a room of her own. This delights the grandparents, and startles the Lawsons who are now committed to accepting "Vicki's" new life and persona in the family. In the close, Joan warms up to how more "natural" a daughter "Vicki" seems now and balks at Ted's attempts to sneak up on Vanessa and reprogram her.
TGTBT's premise is that Vanessa's a young teen who thinks she knows
everything but doesn't anticipate the consequences of anything. She is in a very
real way a reflection of Jamie's adolescent personality, though she views his
"master macho" with contempt. She also thinks she's better than humans,
even though she fumbles and stumbles while trying to imitate us. The trick here
is making Vanessa human-like without forgetting she's a robot, which was well
executed for the most part with Vicki, who was played as a straight automaton
almost throughout season one. Vanessa's livelier "cognizer" artificial
intelligence only acts like a sassy teenager; though she can mimic
emotions and even interpret them, there's no real feeling or conscience
underneath. There's nothing cold about this; we won't be seeing sentient computers for a
long while, but so long as Vanessa walks like a duck and acts like a duck, does
it matter? (see Vicki on Dunahue) This puts the stress on the rest of the family to use inventive logic
to rein her impulsive "whims" and perform damage control, and it's up
to Jamie to set a good example for her (right). The most obvious source of
amusement would've been Vanessa's relationships with boys, which would've been
a welcome change for Brissette, enabling her to break out of pinafores for good.
Such were the aims of a script heralding the show's revamp from its crippling juvenile track into a more mainstream product, but the script had far more ambitious designs to exploit the popularity of the show's most unpredictable character in a spin-off of her own. There were naturally dozens of series concepts for TGTBT discussed, one of which, the "runner-up" to the final treatment, had Ted kicking Vanessa out to "reform school" (i.e. the junkpile) after she flunks a third try at peacefully living with the Lawsons while the Lawson grandparents are over (and Child Services officer Fernwald, who assumes Vanessa is Vicki's spoiled twin forsaken by her own adopted parents and threatens taking custody). The grandparents save Vanessa's bacon by insisting on adopting her with the intention of "taming" her into a well-mannered child themselves, with all the unique hard-knocks and exasperations and certain tears to go along with it. This clever instant grandparent guardians angle had lots of potential humanity which, played right, could've been just as charming as it was unique, but handled wrong, could appear like "Punky Brewster Meets the Golden Girls." Still, the concept of elderly couples adopting artificial children to bring new light into their empty nests and renew challenges in their lives is an idea in science fiction that could very likely come to pass (see Why Seniors Doted Vicki).
Alas, TGTBT was dumped because of Fox's doubts of a robot child making it in the face of a new flurry of racy sitcoms such as Married...With Children and The Tracy Ullman Show, and it had recently killed an animated Small Wonder project by Filmation for cheaper imported live-action children's shows. Furthermore, studios are very leery about the snakepit of handling contracts with actors playing parallel shows, though a new actress playing Vicki's "twin" à la Dallas was contemplated. Though mourned by the writers, the rejected TGTBT did generate a theme song of sorts. It would've been touching to've seen how Luddite-at-heart Bill Lawson takes to a very impulsive yet socially immature new "daughter" who is also a machine, and particularly interesting to've seen just how the elder Lawsons would've handled and disciplined an undiluted Vanessa, who would've remained just as sassy and devilish in character as before in her own series rather than just being watered down to mere impishness for Small Wonder's fifth-season.
Along with a new boudoir in the TGTBT series, sassy Vanessa would've had a classy makeover that would've "forgotten" her twin-ship with Vicki in looks and style (See above). One untried gimmick since "The Bad Seedling" was making her an ash blonde with blue eyes to strike a sassy marked contrast from Vicki. Leeds trashed this idea as unnecessary, along with the expense and added insurance of fitting Brissette with contact lenses. Since Vanessa's impudence would've shunned any relation with Vicki anyway, it's possible this change would've been resurrected for TGTBT The Series, but with a crimson-haired Vanessa rather than a blonde to denote her character, suggesting demureness rather than impishness. Notable is the exasperated (but writers' affectionate) nickname that the Lawsons and Andersons would've given Vanessa throughout TGTBT the series or the fifth season as her standard moniker and gimmick: The Mechminx!
Both fifth-season Small Wonder and pilot Too Good To Be True series scripts still exist in Fox's vaults. (One of mine, of Vanessa's first slumber party, rests in peace there too. In my drawer waits a poignant guns-in-school script whose blunt message can only really work with an android.) Many have a very different tone from the previous shows, "feeling" more like Family Ties than a robotic ALF. It was only a pity Small Wonder couldn't have launched with such a reality tone from the get-go because an android-in-the-house premise had a lot of sci-fi sociological legs as we head for a century that will one way or other see a non-fictional Vicki.