She was the leopard mini-wearing Jewish nanny from Flushing, Queens; she had style, she had flair, she was there, and Miss Fine and her nasal giggle were a staple presence in homes of millions across the world every night in the 90s. But when the wildly successful television show The Nanny wrapped in 1999, the finale wasn’t how star Fran Drescher imagined.

In fact, the actress, now 63, says she would have loved to have kept Fran Fine and Maxwell Sheffield’s sexual tension in place and not seen them marry, a decision she says the show was pushed into by the studio’s producers.

“I would have written a great season finale, but not changed the dynamic of the relationship [between Fran and Maxwell],” she explained to news.com.au in a resurfaced interview. “So the show would have ended with her being the nanny of the kids, and him being her boss but the two of them sharing a certain attraction that never got realised… Honestly, I would have preferred not to wrap the show up the way it was at all. That was dictated to us by the network — to get [Fran and Maxwell] married, and hope they could get one last season out of it and increase ratings. It really wasn’t our choice.”

Fran Drescher (left, as Fran Fine) and Charles Shaughnessy (right, as Maxwell Sheffield) star in THE NANNY. (Photo by CBS via Getty Images)

Her opinion does come as surprising as season-after-season, audiences would tune in to see just how this love story would end. We waited for the moment CC Babcock didn’t burst into Mr. Sheffield’s office at the exact time he may have kissed Miss Fine. We waited while Mr. Sheffield watched on with judgment and jealousy as Miss Fine went on numerous dates with very unsuitable suitors. There was closeness, there were near-misses and for six seasons of flirtation, we waited for these two to get together. When they finally did, audiences cheered and their wedding, had it been in today’s social media world, surely would have been dubbed as much of a must-watch as Meghan and Harry’s.

What we didn’t buy into was the secondary plotline – Niles the Butler getting together with CC. It appears too, the character’s didn’t understand this union either.

“That’s the only part that I never really bought, to tell you the truth,” Daniel Davis, who played Niles, said to news.com.au. “C.C. and I had been so oil and water — I didn’t buy that we would end up married. But I had to play it, because that’s what they wrote … I don’t think I’ve ever expressed that to anyone before!”

For those in the US, The Nanny, will be available on HBO Max to stream all six seasons from April 1.

How would you have wanted to see things end?