There was a time when Linda Bloodworth-Thomason planned on being a newspaper columnist. Among the jobs the “Designing Women” creator held before her television writing career took off was as a reporter for the Los Angeles Daily Journal, for which she covered the trial of Charles Manson. She was familiar with the daily grind of journalism and sharing her opinions and views in a column seemed like an ideal gig.

In 1973, Bloodworth-Thomason began writing scripts for “M*A*S*H*,” the first of which, “Hot Lips and Empty Arms,” co-written with her friend Mary Kay Place, was nominated for an Emmy. When she shared her columnist dream with “M*A*S*H*” co-creator Larry Gelbart, he had some advice.

“He told me, ‘Oh, honey, you don’t want to have a column in a newspaper,’” she recalls during a recent phone interview from her home in Los Angeles. “You want to get your column on TV. That’s what I’m doing, and do you know how many people saw my ‘column’ this week?’”

Tens of millions.

“Larry already knew that I was interested in the TV thing, and he just kind of put the nail in the coffin of me being a columnist.”

The Fourth Estate’s loss was television’s gain. Along with “Designing Women,” which ran from 19861992 on CBS, Bloodworth-Thomason created the Arkansas-based series “Evening Shade” starring Burt Reynolds and Marilu Henner; the political comedy “Hearts Afire” with John Ritter, Markie Post and Billy Bob Thornton; and the short-lived “Designing Women” spin-off “Women of the House.” At her side throughout was her husband, director-producer and Arkansas native Harry Thomason.

On April 14, Bloodworth-Thomason received the 2024 Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for Television Writing Achievement from the Writers Guild of America West in Los Angeles for her work in advancing “the literature of television and … outstanding contributions to the profession of the television writer.” She was inducted by Jean Smart, one of the stars of “Designing

Women.” Past winners of the laurel award include Gelbart, David Chase, Shonda Rhimes and Steven Bochco.

Not that she was expecting to be included among that company when guild president Meredith Stiehm first reached out to her.

“Harry says, ‘Maybe she has good news,’” Bloodworth-Thomason recalls. “I said that I thought I was getting kicked out of the guild, or maybe we forgot to pay our dues.”

Annie Potts played Mary Jo Shively on “Designing Women,” and she and Bloodworth-Thomason are close friends.

“She is so deserving, and she hasn’t gotten enough recognition, I think,” Potts says. “To get that award, especially from her peers, is pretty great.”

Former CBS President Jeff Sagansky, who was at the helm during Bloodworth-Thomason’s string of hits for the network, remains a fan and ardent supporter.

“My biggest thought is that this award is about 20 years overdue,” he says. “She cut such a wide swath through the television landscape and through the cultural landscape of America.”

A WONDERFUL TALKER

Bloodworth-Thomason is a wonderful talker. All an interviewer really needs to do is ask a question or bring up a topic and she is off, often hilariously, down various conversational back alleys and turnroads before returning to whatever the original subject happened to be. Throughout a nearly two-hour interview, she spoke at length about her upbringing, her early years in Hollywood, writing, her philanthropic work for young women, her various series and her friendship with Bill and Hillary Clinton (she produced campaign documentaries for the Clintons, and she and Thomason were co-chairs of Bill Clinton’s 1992 Presidential Inauguration Committee).

Bloodworth-Thomason is from Poplar Bluff, Mo., and her parents both have roots in Arkansas. She’s in the process of writing her memoir, and has found that revisiting her family’s history and her childhood has been a joy: “It just comes out of me like the river I grew up on, the Current River, which connects Missouri and Arkansas.”

Her grandfather, Charles Thomas Bloodworth, was a lawyer, newspaper editor and chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party despite having only attended school through the sixth grade. A liberal, he lived in Corning and often defended Black clients, she says. After many threats, he was shot by a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He survived and moved his family, including four sons who also became lawyers, to Poplar Bluff, where they lived at 626 Cynthia St.

Bloodworth-Thomason says that as of now her memoir will be called “626 Cynthia” because “everything about me came from that house. That’s where I grew up.” (An earlier, rejected title, “I Stared Down Charlie Manson,” was inspired by her time as a reporter).

Her parents were Ralph and Claudia Bloodworth; her father was a liberal lawyer who she calls “Atticus Finch with liquor” and who openly opposed the Vietnam War.

The Bloodworth household was filled with family members talking and arguing over politics, religion and social issues. It was also a place of support for her. She remembers being a young girl and seeing Queen Elizabeth on television.

“I guess I said something like, ‘It would be great if I could meet her,’ and my dad and uncle said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if she could meet you?’ What a thought!”

In her acceptance speech during the writer’s guild ceremony, she says that her father “and my uncles and grandfather were not civil rights heroes. They didn’t march in Selma, but they stood up. Most importantly, these glorious men took me under their tutelage.”

It’s not a stretch to see how growing up in a home where Tennyson and Shakespeare were quoted and issues were discussed and argued as a matter of course had an influence on the left-leaning, opinionated characters of “Designing Women,” who held forth weekly on issues both serious and not so serious.

“It was this progressive, liberal-thinking, Southern environment,” Bloodworth-Thomason says. “I was raised in that environment and to me it’s the most attractive environment.”

MOVING TO L.A.

After graduating with an English degree from the University of Missouri at Columbia she moved to Los Angeles in 1969 and taught high school in the Watts community. In 1971 she met Place, an Oklahoma native and secretary at CBS who would later become an actress with a long string of film and TV credits including “Private Benjamin,” “The Big Chill,” “Diane,” “All in the Family,” “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” and more.

They became fast friends and wrote sketches for Lily Tomlin.

“She knew everybody,” Bloodworth-Thomason says of Place. “We started writing for ‘M*A*S*H*.’ We were lucky to be among the few women writing comedy, and none of them were cheerleaders from Missouri and Oklahoma, so we were kind of a novelty. Everyone else was from New York or Los Angeles.

“I also think that we hit it just right, because we were writing about women and we had a different perspective. It was an exciting period.”

Bloodworth-Thomason says they were mentored by Gelbart, “All in the Family” creator Norman Lear and “Mary Tyler Moore” co-creator Jim Brooks.

Place went into her roles in front of the camera while Bloodworth-Thomason continued to write, including scripts for “Rhoda,” and the original pilot for “One Day at a Time.” She met Harry, a recent transplant from Arkansas, in 1980.

“He was so different from anyone else I’d ever dated,” she says. “He’d come out here on a one-way plane ticket and a ‘Reader’s Digest’ story … He’d be the guy hanging out of the helicopter to get the shot. There was nothing he couldn’t fix. He got that from working on small films in Arkansas. He just had so much more knowledge than people who’d gone to film school. It’s one of his great gifts.”

They married in 1983 and formed Mozark Productions, the company that produced “Designing Women,” “Evening Shade,” “Hearts Afire” and more.

She created and produced “Filthy Rich,” a soap opera spoof that ran on CBS. It was around for just one season, but featured Dixie Carter and Delta Burke, who would eventually star in “Designing Women.” She met future “Designing Women” stars Potts and Smart when they appeared on an episode of a series she worked on called “Lime Street.”

“I thought that if I could get those four women together, that would be a lot of fun,” she says, crediting casting director Fran Bascom for pulling it off.

“She cast all of my shows, and she’s really the reason for ‘Designing Women,’ ‘Evening Shade,’ everything I did. I’d never heard of Dixie or Delta or any of them until she started bringing them to me. She was unrelenting and just a beautiful woman.”

‘DESIGNING WOMEN’ DEBUT

The “Designing Women” pilot aired on Sept. 29, 1986; the last episode aired Sept. 25, 1992. Set in Atlanta, the halfhour sitcom revolved around Julia Sugarbaker (Carter), owner of the interior design firm Sugarbaker and Associates. She is joined by her sister and former beauty queen, Suzanne (Burke), designer-partner Mary Jo Shively (Potts), office manager-partner Charlene Frazier (Smart) and delivery man-partner Anthony Bouvier (Meshach Taylor).

“The real story is the connection between the four of us,” Potts says. “It was how we as actresses played off of each other with the material we were given. It was magical from the get-go.”

The show, which was nominated for 18 Prime Time Emmy Awards, tackled topics ranging from AIDS to sexual harassment, single parenthood, safe sex and other issues with humor, intelligence and a confident, self-righteous streak. (Fun facts: The exterior of the Sugarbaker design firm is the grand Villa Marre, a house at 1321 Scott St., in Little Rock. The Arkansas Governor’s Mansion was also featured in the show.)

“She was all about making it perfect,” Potts says of working with Bloodworth-Thomason. “She wrote the first season herself, which is some kind of crazy feat … but she had it in her mind how she wanted it to be.”

“Evening Shade” aired from Sept. 21, 1990, to May 23, 1994, and starred Reynolds as a former pro football player who returned to his home town to coach his old high school team. Though it was set in a small town, it showed its Southern characters as something more than stereotypes created by people on one of the coasts.

“I wanted to write about a family in Arkansas and I wanted a lot of erudite, well-read characters,” Bloodworth-Thomason says of the origins of “Evening Shade.”

“People hadn’t seen Southerners depicted on television the way Linda depicted them,” says Sagansky, the former CBS president who gave her the green light on the show. “She really helped change television in that way.”

Such was her success that at one point, Bloodworth-Thomason had a writing and producing contract with CBS for $50 million, which at the time was the largest in the company’s history.

FRIENDSHIP WITH THE CLINTONS

The Thomasons became friendly with the Clintons via Harry’s brother, Danny, who she refers to as “a genius comedian who just happens to be an optometrist.” (Another fun fact: Bloodworth-Thomason wrote a part for Danny Thomason in an episode of “Designing Women” as a crooked accountant.)

She and Harry made commercials for the Clinton presidential campaign, which led to Bloodworth-Thomason producing “The Man from Hope,” the Clinton bio-pic that aired during the Democratic National Convention in 1992. She wasn’t a popular choice among some, she says.

“In Washington, all of these political consultants … had their hat in the ring to do the film and they’re like, what? This sitcom person is gonna do your film? But Bill never wavered.”

The film included the first showing of the now-famous footage of a teenage Bill Clinton shaking hands with President John F. Kennedy at the White House during a Boy’s State trip.

“Nobody knew that was going to be in there,” she says. “It was like this wave went across Madison Square Garden.”

She went on to produce several others bio-pics for Bill and Hillary Clinton, including 1996’s “A Place Called America,” which she says is a favorite of hers and President Clinton’s.

In 2004, her novel, “Liberating Paris,” set in the small Arkansas community of Paris, was published. She directed and produced the 2013 documentary “Bridegroom: A Love Story, Unequaled,” about the relationship between two young gay men, Shane Bitney Crone and Thomas Lee “Tom” Bridegroom, and the aftermath following Bridegroom’s death.

She also maintains the Designing Women Foundation, a nonprofit that includes the Charlie Classics Reading Program, which encourages Poplar Bluff junior high and high school students to read 100 literary classics by the time they graduate, and the Claudia Foundation, named for her mother, which offers scholarships to girls from Arkansas and Missouri and brings programming to Claudia House at 626 Cynthia St.

“My mother gave me everything,” she says, “and I’m just trying to pass it on. We’ve sent 177 girls to college.”

It has been a while since she has worked in television, and she says she doesn’t have any stories to pitch for the small screen. She does lament what she sees as a dearth of smart, memorable Southern characters, especially women, on TV now.

“I don’t think Southerners are faring any better at all. I see a much more homogenized brand of comedy where you don’t really remember the characters.”

She says she is working on a screenplay, and ventured into theater in recent years with “Designing Women 2020: The Big Split,” which has played in Fayetteville and Little Rock.

“I wouldn’t have revisited ‘Designing Women,’” she says, “but everybody kept asking me what Julia Sugarbaker would say about Donald Trump, so I felt kind of obligated. … I’ve really gotten interested in playwriting. I’ve gotten the bug for it, and I think the next thing I do might be another play.”

And there is still that memoir to tackle.

“I’m not good at revealing myself to strangers,” she admits. “But I’ve had a lot of big adventures in entertainment and politics and I haven’t talked about them that much, and so I thought maybe I should.”