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 Good Morning, Miss Bliss, which ran on the Disney Channel from 1988 to 1989 before then moving to NBC and being renamed Saved By The Bell.  The entire show is currently streaming on Prime!

This week, Miss Bliss almost becomes Zach’s stepmother.

Episode 1.5 “Parents and Teachers”

(Dir by Gary Shimokawa, originally aired on December 28th, 1988)

It’s parent-teacher week!  Lisa worries that her parents are going to find out that she wears makeup to school.  Miss Bliss promises not to tell them.  Mr. Belding worries that the parents are going to start telling principal jokes so, when he hears a few, he apparently tells a ribald joke about Gumby.  (We don’t get the full details.  Milo says that it involved a side of Pokey that he’d rather not think about …. GOOD GOD, WHAT THE HELL DID BELDING SAY!?)

Miss Bliss is shocked when one of the parents turns out to be Peter (Robert Pine, the sergeant from CHiPs and Chris’s father), a charming man that she met during a singles retreat.  It turns out that Peter is Zach’s father….

Wait, what?  Anyone who has ever watched Saved By The Bell knows that Zach’s parents are not divorced and that his father is Derek Morris, a bearded computer salesman who played baseball in college and who grounded Zach for drinking too much at a senior party.  Who the Hell is this Peter Morris character?  I guess, when Zach moved to California, he got a new father as well.  Maybe Derek Morris was actually his stepfather and the whole reason he moved to California was because his mother remarried.  But why would he bring Lisa. Screech, and Belding with him?

I don’t know.   It’s questions like this that haunt me about the Miss Bliss episodes of Saved By The Bell.  Maybe I’m overthinking this.  Afterall, the only reason why the Good Morning Miss Bliss episodes are considered canon is because they were later added to the Saved By The Bell syndication package with newly shot scenes of Zach saying, “I remember when I was in junior high….”  Really, the simplest answer to all of my questions is that the producers of Saved By The Bell just didn’t care.  They didn’t care about continuity or anything else.  In those pre-Internet days, they thought they could get away with forcing the Miss Bliss episodes into the SBTB universe.  That’s the solution that makes the most sense but I’m a continuity person.  This is going to bother me for the rest of my life, I can tell already.

Anyway, Zach is not happy that Miss Bliss is dating his father.  Quite frankly, I’m not happy about it either.  As a condescending know-it-all, Miss Bliss is already annoying enough without having an active social life.  Fortunately, the relationship doesn’t last.  Zach skips school and, when Miss Bliss catches him, she realizes that it’s simply unethical to date the father of one of her students.

“What if I send Zach to Switzerland?” Peter asks.

Gee, Peter, what if we call Child Protective Services on your ass?  How would you like that?  Seriously, the main message of this episode seems to be that Zach has a terrible father and Miss Bliss has terrible judgment.

Zach is really lucky he got out of Indiana.