‘Party of Five’s Scott Wolf Reflects on How TV Guide Magazine Cover ‘Moved the Needle’ (VIDEO)

Scott Wolf has played quite a few characters over the years that we’re sure fans know him best as. But even if you never watched Party of Five in the ’90s, you likely at least know that was one of his major roles. So in honor of the 25th anniversary of the series finale (May 3, 2000), when Wolf stopped by TV Insider’s office to discuss his Doc role in-depth, we had him look back at a cover of TV Guide Magazine from December 9, 1995, for that family drama.

“This is the throwback of throwbacks for TV Guide Magazine. I’ve talked about this edition for years. ‘The Best Show You’re Not Watching,'” he said, quoting the magazine. “It was this honor, but also this weird honor. It’s like, you’re the best of the not happenings, but we also knew that the whole point of it was to talk about the fact that we were an endangered series, that not enough people were watching and our ratings weren’t high enough. What’s bananas is, this was in 1994, so I want to say we had 13 million viewers every week, but because there was so fewer — all these streaming services didn’t exist, 13 million was just a death knell you were going to get canceled.”

He recalled that the cover “helped a lot. There are bits and pieces of publicity that can come out that may or may not register with people, may help, may not help. I honestly think this moved the needle because this was still in everybody’s homes or grocery counters. … This was probably the most widespread sort of word that got out about our show and at a time where, yeah, we were showing up, being told, ‘We have no idea how long we’re going to get to go at this rate. The network believes in what we’re doing, but if ratings don’t come up, if we don’t get more people watching, we’ll get canceled eventually.’ And so yeah, this was the kind of beginning, I really think, of starting to sort of gather momentum. Ratings started to stabilize because new shows can kind of diminish over time. It’s amazing to see this.  This is the first time I’ve seen it in decades probably, but we were cute.”

The series, for six seasons, followed the five Salinger siblings after their parents’ deaths in a car accident as they’re forced to live on their own, with oldest son Charlie (Matthew Fox) appointed the guardian of his brothers and sisters. We had him read some of his and others’ quotes in the article, including about the show bringing in Jennifer Love Hewitt to play his love interest and how their chemistry expanded her role from recurring guest to series regular.

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“When Jennifer Love Hewitt came onto the show, it was fantastic. Bailey had had, I think, one, maybe two other girlfriends on the show, and they were written to be more fleeting, and he was only 16 years old. But when Jennifer Love was cast and we started playing scenes together, it was pretty clear that there was a really great chemistry between us and a really sort of beautiful, complicated — I don’t know, it had sort of tragic elements to it, but really beautiful innocence to it,” Wolf shared.

“For a show that was really about these young teenage characters, shows weren’t telling stories like that and showing relationships like that,” he continued, adding, “Jennifer is just lovely and yeah, if I get a chance to work together with her or any of the cast of Party of Five, I’m happy.”

Watch the full video above for much more from Scott Wolf about Party of Five.