The Wonder Years' Alley Mills says a sexual harassment accusation got the show canceled

Alley Mills, who played Norma Arnold on The Wonder Years, recently told Yahoo that a sexual harassment accusation got the show canceled before a seventh season could be filmed, and she believes the whole thing was “ridiculous.” In 1993, a costume designer named Monique Long filed a sexual harassment suit against stars Fred Savage and Jason Hervey (who were 16 and 20 at the time), saying they had “verbally and physically harassed her” to the point where she couldn’t do her job properly and got fired. As Mills tells it, this disrupted the production so much that the network decided to can the show, but she thought it was a “big joke” at the time that was just “going to blow over” because Savage is “the least offensive, most wonderful, sweet human being that ever walked the face of the Earth.”

Long’s suit was settled for an undisclosed sum out of court, and Mills believes their network, ABC, “bought her off.” She says it was “incorrigible” to try and “avoid a scandal” like that, since it just “made them look guilty.” Part of Long’s frustration about all of this came from the fact that the cast and crew were placed under a gag order at the time, preventing them from talking about the accusations publicly. Long, meanwhile, told Yahoo that she stands by her claims.