Hard to imagine Three’s Company‘s Jack Tripper and The Waltons‘ John-Boy Walton as pals. But when actor John Ritter, then a character actor in his early 20s, joined the beloved family drama in 1972, he found a lifelong kindred spirit in his costar Richard Thomas, who’d just turned 21.
Ritter entered the series in an episode of its first season, playing fresh-from-divinity-school Baptist preacher Rev. Matthew Fordwick, whose hellfire ‘n brimstone ways don’t exactly mesh with Walton’s Mountain’s more kindly and sensible approach to life, the Lord and — most of all — each other.