Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Saturdays, I will be reviewing the Canadian sitcom, Check it Out, which ran in syndication from 1985 to 1988. The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi!
This week, everybody wants something they’ll never give up.
Episode 1.10 “Car Pool”
(Dir by John Bell, originally aired on December 4th, 1985)
One rainy morning, Howard comes to work, just to discover that his assistant manager, Jack Christian, has parked his new BMW in Howard’s space. As Jack explains it, there wasn’t any other place to park in the small lot. The other employees all mention that all of their parking space were also taken by customers. Howard tells his employees that he’s going to call Mrs. Cobb and tell her that they need a bigger parking lot.
That conversation does not go well. As Howard explains afterwards, negotiations with Mrs. Cobb always involve “give and take.” In this case, Mrs. Cobb gave Howard his job back after initially firing him and she even agreed to let him keep his parking space. And then Mrs. Cobb took away everyone else’s parking space.
Needless to say, no one is happy about this. (Considering that we already had a whole episode about Marlene organizing a union at the store, it’s a little surprising they don’t all stage a walk out in protest.) However, Christian has a solution. He organizes a car pool. He agrees to pick everyone up in his van and drive them to work. He’ll only charge each of them $5 for the trip to the store and then $8 for the trip home. (“The drive home is mostly uphill,” Christian explains.) After everyone agrees, Christian then swindles Howard out of an additional $40 to cover expenses.
Unfortunately, the van has faulty brakes and Christian ends up slamming into the back of someone else’s car while driving everyone to work. As a result, everyone ends up in the hospital and Christian ends up getting sued by the woman who was driving the car that he hit. He agrees to settle for $15,000, which he raises by selling his BMW to Howard.
However, no sooner has new luxury car owner Howard started wearing aviator shades and a scarf then a cop (played by Don Lake) shows up and inform Christian that the old woman he hit was actually a con artist and has been arrested. The cop hands Christian back his money and Howard gives Christian back his BMW. Then the cop mentions that the old woman tried to flee from police and crashed into a BMW, which causes Christian to faint. The cop, however, is more concerned with talking to his bookie on the phone than with checking to see if Christian is still alive.
I haven’t even mentioned the scene where Edna explains that she doesn’t care about employee parking because she just parks illegally in the street. When Howard asks her about the parking tickets that she gets, Edna says that she just tears them in half and tosses them in a nearby garbage can. Way to go, Edna! Of course, when the cop first shows up, there’s an extended sequence of Howard claiming that Edna is actually named Doris and that the Edna that the cop is looking for has gone on vacation to Cuba.
There was a lot going on in this weird but funny episode. In this episode, the show acknowledges that, while dumb people can be funny, dumb people who think they’re smart are even funnier. Everyone in this episode thought they were more clever than they actually were. Howard thought he could talk Mrs. Cobb into expanding the parking lot. Christian thought he could swindle the other employees (and it turned out that actually he could, even if his own natural bad luck ultimately thwarted him). Con artist Ruby Wexler thought she could swindle Christian (and she nearly succeeded). In the end, only Edna actually got away with anything, with the cop explaining that Edna had accidentally been issued diplomatic plates and was therefore not subject to traffic laws. This episode definitely made me laugh more than any other episode of this show that I’ve watched so far. Check that out.
Through the Shattered Lens 