Susan Dey and Eve Plumb achieved pop-culture legend status around the same time. Susan on The Partridge Family and Eve on The Brady Bunch. Both cast off the teen sitcom shackles successfully, in surprisingly graphic TV films. However...

Dey, as Laurie Partridge, was on a thematically consistent show in which there was no room to stretch. She was pleasant, funny, liberated, and gorgeous, but allowed zero range.

So, Mary Jane Harper Cried Last Night is quite a surprise.

Mary Jane is a little girl with clear abuse injuries. Susan Dey is her well-to-do, mentally ill mother. The System is structured in such a way that no one can help Mary Jane, whose mother eventually kills her.

Portions of the film remain quite disturbing, and Dey shows excellent range. You won’t think of Laurie. It holds up.

Eve Plumb, as Jan Brady, was on a legendarily inconsistent show that could, and did, range from drama to slapstick to musical -- sometimes in consecutive scenes. She was an excellent actress who could handle the stylistic swings with ease. Audiences knew her range.

Her breakout, Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway, is a relentlessly bleak look at teen prostitution. It isn’t titillating. It is graphic and depressing. Dawn flees a dismal home life for Hollywood. She drifts into prostitution.

Alexander, a teen hustler who services gay men, falls in love with her. Beatings. Murders. Brutal pimps. Eve does beautifully. However…

The Brady Bunch was stylistically all over the place, and Eve carried many episodes, so there is no element of surprise in Dawn. You know her ability. So, unfortunately, you can’t not think of Jan Brady. It is very much like a Brady Bunch episode gone horribly awry in which Angry Jan hits the streets.

Eve Plumb showed her dramatic chops, years later, in Blue Ruin (from director Jeremy Saulnier, recently known for Rebel Ridge). Is that Jan Brady grown up and part of a crime family? Why, yes it is. And don’t mess with her.

In Saulnier’s directorial debut, Plumb’s character, Kris Cleland, is the eldest sister of a Virginia family whose antics are not very Brady of them.

Lucille Ball is an interesting case. She was already an established film and radio star when she became a legend. She tried to break out when the half hour and full hour Lucy Ricardo shows ran their course.

Lucy went to Broadway in a big way, opening the new musical Wildcat. Set in the 1920s, the musical centers on an oilfield “Wildcat" flapper sort. Critics raved over Lucille as a stage presence. She was more than Lucy Ricardo. Tickets sold out immediately.

Audiences, however, didn’t rave. They paid big bucks to see Lucy Ricardo. So the part was tinkered with to introduce some familiar Ricardoisms. And a lavish I Love Lucy cast reunion was scripted and funded: Lucy Goes to Broadway. Lucy asks Viv, who narrates, to help her prepare for Wildcat. William Frawley and Desi Arnaz appear. Etc.

Severe health problems, stemming from exhaustion, caused Lucy to collapse more than once. Wildcat went on hiatus, twice, and was finally closed permanently despite robust ticket sales.

Lucy then went on to star in The Good Years, a beyond bonkers 1962 made-for-TV adaptation of Walter Lord’s bestseller.

Meant as a whimsical history of the U.S. 1900-1914, costarring Henry Fonda and Mort Sahl, and directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, a friend of mine correctly described it as a Fever Dream. It is a collage of live skits, filmed skits, archival footage, and a zombie chorus in period clothing flatly chanting “The Good Years.”

Lucy retreated to familiar territory and The Lucy Show. Elements of the Lucy Goes to Broadway script were recycled into it.

Jump ahead nearly a decade, and her son, Desi Arnaz Jr., had achieved stardom as a teen pop singer, and sitcom actor on his mother’s show Here’s Lucy. He left the show to branch out into film. His Breakout attempt was in Marco (1973), one of the last huge-budget musicals that tried to cash in on The Sound of Music.

The film was a joint American-Japanese production in which Arnaz played Marco Polo, and Zero Mostel played Kublai Khan.

Marco was one of those overproduced movies that, somehow, manages to look low-budget. It went largely unreleased, and largely uncommented on, and was a major financial catastrophe. It’s difficult to find, and about as joyous as Mary Jane Harper Cried Last Night when you do find it.

That said, Arnaz isn’t bad in it. It’s just that the film itself is unsalvageable. His career never recovered.

Parker Stevenson did stalwart well. He became a star as the stalwart Hardy Brother, opposite ebullient Shaun Cassidy, on The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries.

Stevenson’s Breakout was in a made-for-TV horror film called This House Possessed.

He plays a very stalwart rock star who has a nervous breakdown on stage. He hires a private nurse. His house falls in love with said nurse, and kills anyone who gets close to her.

Huh?

Yes. The house spits blood out of the shower on his hard-bitten groupie girlfriend. It boils Joan Bennett (who Knows The Secret) to death in a swimming pool. Crushes The Librarian Who Figures It Out to death in a burning car, using the security gate. Tries to strangle Stephenson with a garden hose.

Resolution? The nurse yells “If you really love me, you’d let me leave!” at the house. And it stops strangling Stevenson and lets them both leave.

The secret? The nurse lived in the house as a child. It fell in love with her then and murdered her parents. She has amnesia on that plot point.

No, it isn’t a comedy. Stevenson remains stalwart throughout. But it is a fun Guilty Pleasure watch. It neither helped nor hindered his career.

I saw Justine Bateman onstage in New York City, in The Crucible, at the height of her Family Ties fame. I will be kind, and simply say “Mallory Goes to Salem."

I also saw Justine in her Breakout film, Satisfaction. A dramedy about A kickass uncompromising girl singer in a kickass uncompromising girl band, all of whom kick ass uncompromisingly as they achieve stardom.

Now, this would have been a fun, if not exactly great, film for Suzi Quatro ten years earlier. It could have been a fun vehicle for a female rocker in the 1980s. But, just as Michael J. Fox had no Elvis in him, Justine had no Janis or Suzi in her.

Again: Mallory suffuses the entire film. Stick around for her special…very special…rendition of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” under the end credits. It will plague you forever after.

Satisfaction was a major flop. Today it holds a weird fascination as a piece of 1980s nostalgia, awash in every aesthetic cliché that adults thought 1980s teens thought cool.

It is also noted for featuring a then-unknown Julia Roberts.

Scott Valentine, who played Justine Bateman’s Family Ties boyfriend, Nick, had attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in NYC. He was up for a major film role in Lords of Discipline, but was hit by a truck and lost momentum during a prolonged recovery.

He then found fame playing a very limited character on the sitcom. Valentine was given three attempts to spin off, the third of which, The Art of Being Nick (costarring Julia-Louise Dreyfus), aired as a TV special in 1987. It was a hit, but producers did not want to lose a popular character on Family Ties and so did not pick up the show for the fall schedule.

Valentine’s eventual Breakout role was in the film My Demon Lover, in which he portrayed a street singer who turns into a demon when sexually aroused, and who fears he may be a serial killer.

Box office failure. The film aimed for an An American Werewolf in London comic horror vibe but missed.

Of which, David Naughton first became known as the cheerful “I'm a Pepper” singing pitchman in Dr Pepper commercials. A failed sitcom, Makin' It, gave him a U.S. Top Ten hit song of the same title.

An American Werewolf in London, a classic comic horror film, was his Breakout moment.

The John Landis film, co-starring Griffin Dunne and Jenny Agutter, is a smash, with a lot of flair, and Naughton was fun to watch in it.

Tony Danza hit the big time in a support role on Taxi, and solidified his career as lead on the long running sitcom Who's the Boss?

Who’s the Boss? used “Loving protective father clashes with Nice Teen Daughter Who Wants a Little Autonomy" as the A-Plot on seemingly every other episode. Inoffensive at best, and very popular.

Something went very wrong with his Breakout film She's Out of Control.

Plain teenage daughter (Ami Dolenz) becomes hottt -- and dad can’t cope. Dad watches her bounce out of the ocean in a bikini. Camera pulls in to his reaction as “Oh Yeah,” by Yello, plays. Ick.

A surprisingly racist gag features a montage of Danza opening the front door to a succession of “Dad's Nightmare” suitors culminating in a black guy. Relax! He was only delivering pizza.

Gene Siskel opined that the comedy was so depressing that it made him reconsider his career as a film critic. Audiences agreed and the film failed to turn a profit.

Alyssa Milano, Tony Danza's Who's the Boss? daughter, fared better.

She played Schwarzenegger’s fearless daughter in the mega-hit Commando and then, as Who’s The Boss wound down, acquitted herself well in the smash hit Fear.

Denise Nickerson found fame on Dark Shadows; achieved legendary status as Violet Beauregarde in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971); and was the lead singer in Short Circus, the Girl Group on The Electric Company.

Nickerson’s Breakout Role may well be the strangest and most ill-advised of all.

Nickerson played the lead in the first, and only, pedophiliac Broadway Musical: Lolita, My Love. Yes. Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous novel was adapted as a musical, with Violet Beauregard as the “Gamine.” It closed in tryouts, but sound-board recordings come and go from YouTube.

No matter. Nickerson’s performance in Wonka was for the ages. She remains among the music makers and dreamers of dreams.

Which brings us to the Breakout Role heart of Darkness.

Prettybelle.

Angela Lansbury had a career mostly free of missteps. She never aged out of good roles. She never became typecast.

However, she spent several seasons on Broadway and on tour in Mame, in the mid 1960s. Her 1969 Broadway followup to Mame, Dear World, a musical adaptation of Madwoman of Chaillot, quickly closed. Her public wanted Mame.  Miss Lansbury needed a Breakout role, lest she become typecast. She needed a new production that could not be mistaken for a Mame rehash.

No one could ever …ever… accuse Prettybelle of being a Mame cash-in.

With the combined talents of Lansbury, Gower Champion, and Jules Styne, how could it possibly miss?

Prettybelle was a dark musical comedy. It centered upon the widow of an abusive, brutal, Southern Sheriff who allows minority men to rape her in atonement. She runs afoul of the Klan and dictates her memoirs from the safety of a mental hospital.

To say critics and audiences hated it in Boston tryouts is a massive understatement. The audience is known to have booed it violently and, anecdotally, to have trashed part of the theatre. The Broadway opening was cancelled.

Yes. It wasn’t Mame.

What it was is hard to figure out. Vulgar, unpleasant, morass as critics claimed? Or a dark comedy unsuited for the expectations of audiences and critics who, in truth, were hoping for another genial Angela Lansbury musical like Mame? (Lansbury has her own theories.)

The fiasco was a huge money-loser, but Miss Lansbury emerged unscathed. Prettybelle is a legendary disaster, but due to Lansbury’s abundance of successes, the disaster is merely an amusing footnote to a magnificent career -- spanning everything from Gaslight (1944) to The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to Murder, She Wrote (1984) --  rather than the start of a downward spiral.  

Elizabeth Berkley came to prominence on Saved by the Bell, which was The Brady Bunch of a new era. She played Jessie, the mature, intelligent, sensible girl. Her “Jessie gets addicted to speed" episode shaped a generation.

Berkley’s breakout role, debatably, became the most infamous of all. She played Nomi, the amoral, ambitious, Vegas titular showgirl in Showgirls. The film harkens back to the glory days of big budget camp cinematic disasters.

Gina Gershon, as the Margo Channing of strippers, wisely played her part tongue-in-cheek, hoping that drag queens would impersonate her at Halloween. Yes. She said that.

Everyone else attacked their parts with earnestness and conviction. Berkley played Nomi, the Eve Harrington of strippers with a straight face. Which helped the film by elevating it to true camp. Camp isn’t camp if one is intentionally campy. Berkley brings Ibsen-quality earnestness to a script that defies adequate description. It becomes quite hilarious. The film has become beloved but, alas for Berkley, it became a career albatross.

And, finally... Farrah Fawcett spent years building a career via small roles in lightweight made for TV fare. Then in 1976 she hit the A-List via her legendary poster and her role as Jill on Charlie’s Angels.

She was the ultimate 1970s Meteoric Rise story and, for a year, Farrah was inescapable. That hair! That smile! That poster!

Then, for reasons still unclear, Fawcett left Charlie’s Angels after one season. The Breakout Star had broken out.

The ensuing lawsuit made producers wary of working with her.

Her much-hyped major film debut, Somebody Killed Her Husband, was a comic mystery that seemed more like a passable made-for-TV film than something you’d pay to see. It was soon dubbed “Somebody Killed Her Career" as it faced wan box office.

Despite the flop, producers made a profit by pre-selling its TV rights during the tail end of Farrah Mania.

Farrah then had to rebuild her career from scratch. There was initial scoffing when she was cast in the Broadway drama Extremities -- followed by surprise when she proved excellent in it.

She became A-List again, but as a solid actor and not as a media sensation.