While Dirty Dancing fans are preparing to return to Kellerman’s with ABC’s May 24 movie starring Abigail Breslin, it’s not the first time TV has taken us back to the Catskills resort.

On Saturday, Oct. 29, 1988, just 14 months after the Patrick Swayze-Jennifer Grey film hit theaters, CBS premiered Dirty Dancing the series. Future Transparent Emmy nominee Melora Hardin starred as Baby, who, in this version, is the 18-year-old daughter of Kellerman’s owner Max (M*A*S*H‘s McLean Stevenson). In the summer of 1963, before she heads off to Mount Holyoke College in the fall, she returns to Kellerman’s to reconnect with her philandering father, who she’d chosen not to see after he and her mother divorced years earlier. She’s hoping for a job as a waitress, but Max hands her the title of talent coordinator — a position that had been held by dance instructor Johnny Castle (Patrick Cassidy), a 23-year-old from Jersey who spends the winter months as a mechanic.

Thirty years later, Hardin admits she doesn’t recall much about the one-season wonder (though she does have all the episodes on DVD). If memory serves, she owes the job to producer Steve Tisch, who worked with her on the 1986 C. Thomas Howell film Soul Man before turning his attention to the half-hour Dirty Dancing series. “I feel like he kind of just decided I was going to be Baby,” she says.

It was fitting, really, because Hardin, who’d grown up as a serious dancer — she went to the Joffrey Ballet in New York on scholarship when she was 13 — had a history with Patrick Swayze. When she was around the same young age, the studio in Toluca Lake, Calif. where she studied ballet decided to add a jazz class — and a pre-fame Swayze taught it. “I think he taught for at least six months or a year. Always arriving on his motorcycle,” she says. “I just remember the tight jeans — tight in the front and the back, I will just point out. His long ’70s hairdo. He just was so sexy and so warm and sweet. I remember being like, ‘Oh my God.’ I think my tongue was out of my mouth the entire class. What a lovely, lovely guy he was. Even then, he was with Lisa [Niemi], his wife [until his death in 2009]. They stayed together forever, and she was also a wonderful dancer and would come sometimes.”



DIrty Dancing Season 1 Episodes 1&2 by y2jin99

Though Swayze (who remembered Hardin years later when they ran into each other backstage at the 1989 Oscars, where he was a presenter and she was in a song-and-dance number) wasn’t involved with the Dirty Dancing series, Hardin was thrilled that the film’s choreographer, Kenny Ortega, was also doing the show. Although she didn’t exactly get to work with him as much as Cassidy did: “I was really a better dancer than Patrick [Cassidy] was. That was kind of hard for me to play down, at first,” she says, “just because I really wanted to dance.”

Ultimately, she embraced it. In the series premiere, Johnny suggests Baby join the staff’s dance number for an upcoming show and throws her into a rehearsal to embarrass her. “There’s a whole section where everyone’s dancing and I’m trying to catch the steps and I’m totally out of rhythm — everyone’s going down and I’m standing up. It’s fun when you actually do have rhythm to try not to have rhythm,” Hardin says. The trick? “Just like anything in acting, you have to think the way the character thinks and believe what the character believes,” she says. “I think people can’t hear the rhythm because they’re in their head too much. It’s just like there’s a whole school of thought, which I think is really true, that everybody is born able to sing. The reason they can’t sing is because someone’s told them along the way that they can’t carry a tune, or they can’t sing, or they shouldn’t sing. I think it’s the same thing with dancing; everyone’s got rhythm, they just have to feel it.”

View photos Baby begins to learn (Photo: CBS) More

Baby begins finding her groove soon enough, and yes, Hardin remembers the network being concerned about how dirty the dirty dancing got. “I think it’s really the first scene where Baby and Johnny dance together. I come in, in that pretty, flowy little dress. I remember loving that dress. And the dancers were all dancers that I took classes with, and it was pretty raunchy. They were, like, in there,” she says with a laugh. “They were grinding and dancing, and even the stuff Patrick and I did was pretty sexy.”

Story continues