Fame (Seasons 1–6)

Fame (1982–1987) is an NBC musical drama series you can watch online on iFILM. Six seasons, over a hundred episodes, built on the 1980 film of the same name. Set at a fictional version of New York's High School for the Performing Arts, the show follows students and teachers — played by Debbie Allen, Lee Curreri, Gene Anthony Ray and others — through the daily grind of becoming artists.

What separates it from a standard school drama is the training itself: the series takes dance, music and acting seriously as disciplines, not backdrops. Students here are not simply talented — they are working. Some will make it. Some will realize they don't want what they thought they wanted. The teachers carry their own histories with ambition, and those histories shape what they pass on.

The show found its biggest audience in the UK and Europe, where the cast's recordings became genuine chart hits and spawned concert tours. Decades on, it holds up as one of the few mainstream American series of its era that treated the performing arts as a subject worth sustained attention. Watch all seasons of Fame online on iFILM.