Charles in Charge Characters: Two Families, One Sitter

Here is the thing that trips people up when they try to remember this show. They picture the house, the stairs, the kid brother, the college guy in the kitchen. Then they try to name the family, and two different sets of faces come up, and they decide their memory is going. It is not. There really were two families in that house.

The Charles in Charge characters come in two configurations, because the show was canceled and then rebuilt from the studs. Charles (Scott Baio), a Copeland College student who minds three kids in exchange for room and board, and his best friend Buddy Lembeck (Willie Aames) are the constants. The Pembroke family held the house for the CBS season in 1984 and 1985. The Powell family moved in when the series came back in first-run syndication in 1987 and stayed to the finish in 1990. The show premiered on CBS on October 3, 1984, ran 22 episodes there, then returned as a syndicated series on January 3, 1987, and ran four more seasons through November 10, 1990, for 126 episodes in all.

The Two Who Never Left

• Charles (Scott Baio): the title character, a 19-year-old student at the fictional Copeland College in New Brunswick, New Jersey, who trades child care for a room. Two things people forget: Charles has no surname (the show never gave him one), and Baio was not a newcomer when this started. He had been Chachi Arcola on Happy Days since 1977, carried the spin-off Joanie Loves Chachi for its 17 episodes, and made his onscreen debut in 1976 playing the title role in Alan Parker’s Bugsy Malone opposite Jodie Foster. While he was starring in this, he was also directing episodes of the kids’ comedy Out of This World, a job the Baio page dates from 1987 through 1991, with 11 credited episodes from 1989 on.
• Buddy Lembeck (Willie Aames): the best friend, the comic relief, and the reason half the show works. Aames came in off Eight Is Enough, where he had played Tommy Bradford, and he had already made a movie with Baio: Zapped! in 1982. He was also, at exactly this time, the voice of Hank the Ranger on the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. After the show finished in 1990, he hosted The Krypton Factor, then spent 1995 to 2003 starring in the direct-to-video Christian superhero series Bibleman. Buddy Lembeck to Bibleman is one of the great 80s-to-90s career pivots.

The Pembrokes: The CBS Season, 1984 to 1985

• Stan Pembroke (James Widdoes): the father who hires Charles. Here is the forgotten part: Widdoes had played fraternity president Robert Hoover in National Lampoon’s Animal House in 1978, and he also became a working sitcom director with a long run on two hits. He directed all but two episodes of the final six seasons of Two and a Half Men, and 122 of the 170 episodes of Mom between April 2015 and May 2021.
• Jill Pembroke (Julie Cobb): the mother, and the one born into the business. Cobb is the daughter of actor Lee J. Cobb. Her first credited role was in Star Trek, the episode “By Any Other Name,” first broadcast in February 1968, and in 1974 she played opposite her own father in an episode of Gunsmoke.
• Lila Pembroke (April Lerman): the Pembroke daughter. Before this, Lerman had played Kate in the 1982 movie of Annie, which means one of the orphans from the Annie film was in that New Brunswick kitchen two years later.
• Douglas Pembroke (Jonathan Ward): one of the two Pembroke boys. Ward’s other credits from that stretch include Mac and Me in 1988 and Steel Magnolias, and he stepped away from acting at 28.
• Jason Pembroke (Michael Pearlman): the other Pembroke boy. Pearlman is the one Pembroke kid who came back: he turned up in the syndicated show’s first episode, “Amityville,” the one that explains where his family went.
• Gwendolyn Pierce (Jennifer Runyon): the Copeland classmate Charles spent the CBS season chasing and never catching. Runyon has a side credit nobody expects. That same year, 1984, she was the student getting the ESP test from Bill Murray’s Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters. Four years later she replaced Susan Olsen as Cindy in the TV movie A Very Brady Christmas.

The Powells: Syndication, 1987 to 1990

• Jamie Powell (Nicole Eggert): one of the two Powell daughters, and the cast member with Baywatch ahead of her. Eggert had been Marci on Who’s the Boss? before this, and after it she became Summer Quinn on Baywatch for its third and fourth seasons, 1992 to 1994. She has been open in recent years about her health: diagnosed with breast cancer in late 2023, she has documented the treatment publicly, and in a November 2025 interview she said, “I’m good right now. I’m testing negative for any disease.” That is the latest word on the record as of September 5, 2026.
• Sarah Powell (Josie Davis): the bookish Powell daughter, in the cast for all 104 syndicated episodes. Davis won the 1989 Young Artist Award for Best Young Actress in a Family Syndicated Show for the role, and later found the quiet-bookish image hard to shake.
• Adam Powell (Alexander Polinsky): the younger brother of the house. Polinsky went into voice work and has been in your kids’ cartoons for two decades: Control Freak on Teen Titans and Teen Titans Go!, Argit in the Ben 10 shows, Dennis Lee on The Life and Times of Juniper Lee, and Darington on Blaze and the Monster Machines.
• Ellen Powell (Sandra Kerns): the mother, a regular from the first syndicated season in January 1987. Her role shrank hard at the end: across the final two seasons she appears just three more times. Kerns last acted in 1993.
• Walter Powell (James T. Callahan): the grandfather, and the character who makes the household make sense. Walter is Ellen’s widowed father-in-law, living with the family to fill the father’s chair while his son is overseas with the Navy. Callahan, a working actor with more than 120 film and television credits between 1959 and 2007, called him the “blustery old grandfather,” and the crankiness was the point.
• Lillian (Ellen Travolta): Charles’s widowed mother, never seen in the CBS season and a central character in the revival. Travolta is John Travolta’s sister, and this was the second time she had played mother to a Scott Baio character: she was Louisa Arcola Delvecchio, Fonzie’s aunt and Chachi’s mom, on Happy Days and Joanie Loves Chachi first.

Why the Cast Changed

This is the question people actually type into Google about this show, and the answer is a good piece of 80s television business.

CBS put Charles in Charge on Wednesdays at 8:00 pm in the fall of 1984, opposite The Fall Guy on ABC and Michael Landon’s new Highway to Heaven on NBC. It did not win that hour. CBS let the show finish the 22 episodes it had ordered, put it on hiatus after the February 27, 1985, episode, burned off the last two in March and April, and replaced it in the lineup.

Then Universal noticed what a lot of studios were noticing in the mid-80s: canceled network shows were getting second lives in first-run syndication, sold station by station instead of to one network. So they rebuilt this one. The new version started January 3, 1987, and of the original cast, Baio and Aames came back. The writers solved the problem in the story instead of pretending: Charles comes home from summer vacation to find strangers in the house, learns the Pembrokes moved to Seattle, and gets told the new family, the Powells, sublet the place and would like to keep the sitter. Two more Pembroke-era actors made return trips, Michael Pearlman in that first syndicated episode and Jennifer Runyon in a two-part story later on.

Remember when a show you thought was dead just showed up again on a local channel one afternoon, with a new family and a remixed theme song, and no explanation offered to anyone under twelve? That is first-run syndication, and Charles in Charge is a textbook case. Tribune stations carried it, and because WGN out of Chicago was a national cable superstation, a show CBS had given up on was suddenly available in living rooms coast to coast.

The Theme Song Nobody Can Shake

The theme was written by David Kurtz, Michael Jacobs and Al Burton, and sung by Shandi Sinnamon. The CBS-season version is noticeably mellower; when the show came back in syndication, the track got remixed, and the remix is the version that ran for the next four years. If you have ever caught yourself humming it in a supermarket, it is most likely the 1987 mix doing it.

The Cast We Lost

Jennifer Runyon (Gwendolyn Pierce) died March 6, 2026, at 65, after a brief battle with cancer. Her friend, the actress Erin Murphy, confirmed her death, writing, “So sad to share that my friend Jennifer Runyon Corman has passed away after a brief battle with cancer… She was a special lady.”

James T. Callahan (Walter Powell) died in August 2007 at 76, at his home in Fallbrook, California. He had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer that February.

The Honest Bottom Line

Charles in Charge is remembered as a lightweight, and the CBS ratings said the same thing at the time. Look at what it actually pulled off, though. A show that a network killed after one season came back, swapped out its entire supporting family, ran four more years and 104 more episodes, and rode the WGN superstation into living rooms coast to coast. It did that by keeping the two things that mattered, a likable lead and a genuinely funny best friend, and rebuilding everything else around them. Plenty of prestige shows never survive losing one cast member. This one lost a whole family and kept going.

Two families and a network switch make this an easy show to misremember, which is why each cast credit here was checked against the record rather than recalled.

FAQ

Who are the main Charles in Charge characters?
Charles (Scott Baio) and Buddy Lembeck (Willie Aames) across the whole series; the Pembrokes in the 1984 CBS season, Stan (James Widdoes), Jill (Julie Cobb), Lila (April Lerman), Douglas (Jonathan Ward) and Jason (Michael Pearlman), plus Gwendolyn Pierce (Jennifer Runyon); and the Powells in syndication, Ellen (Sandra Kerns), grandfather Walter (James T. Callahan), Jamie (Nicole Eggert), Sarah (Josie Davis) and Adam (Alexander Polinsky), plus Charles’s mother Lillian (Ellen Travolta).

Why did the cast change in Charles in Charge?
CBS canceled the show after its 1984 to 1985 season. Universal rebuilt it for first-run syndication two years later, and of the original cast, Scott Baio and Willie Aames returned. The story explained it by moving the Pembrokes to Seattle and having a new family, the Powells, sublet the house and keep Charles on as the sitter.

How many seasons of Charles in Charge are there?
Five, and 126 episodes: one season of 22 episodes on CBS from October 3, 1984, to April 3, 1985, then four syndicated seasons of 26 episodes each, from January 3, 1987, to November 10, 1990.

Who played Charles’s best friend?
Willie Aames played Buddy Lembeck. He had previously played Tommy Bradford on Eight Is Enough, and later starred as the title character in the Bibleman video series from 1995 to 2003.

Was Charles in Charge on CBS or in syndication?
Both. The first season aired on CBS in the 1984 to 1985 television season. The remaining four seasons were first-run syndication, carried by Tribune stations including the WGN superstation.

Which Charles in Charge cast members have died?
Jennifer Runyon, who played Gwendolyn Pierce, died in March 2026 at 65. James T. Callahan, who played grandfather Walter Powell, died in August 2007 at 76.

For the rest of the shows that filled those afternoons, browse our 80s TV shows guide. Gwendolyn’s other 1984 job is here too: meet the Ghostbusters characters. And for another 80s kid who moved in on a grown-up who had not planned on her, meet Punky Brewster.