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, Screech goes on trial!

Episode 1.10 “Practical Jokes”

(Dir by Gary Shimokawa, originally aired on February 25th, 1989)

“It’s Hoosier Harvest Festival!” Miss Bliss tells us.  Apparently, this is some sort of Indiana thing where everyone rolls around in hay and plays practical jokes on each other.  In her 11 years of working at JFK Junior High, Miss Bliss is proud to have never been pranked.  Mr. Belding gets pranked all the time.  In fact, Belding spends this entire episode getting humiliated over and over again.  After eating some tainted food, he runs from the cafeteria.  Miss Bliss has a good laugh over the suffering of a man who, just a few weeks ago, moved Heaven and Earth so she could win the Teacher of the Year award.

In other words, Miss Bliss is a bitch.

When Miss Bliss sits down in class, it turns out that someone has painted her chair.  Her new sweater is ruined!  Miss Bliss gets angry and demands that the responsible party step forward or the entire class will be punished.  The class immediately pressures Screech to confess.  Screech does so and is told that he will have to pay for Miss Bliss’s sweater.  Screech takes back his confession.

Miss Bliss says the only way to settle this is by holding a mock trial.  Hey, that’s convenient!  Would you believe that Miss Bliss just happens to be teaching a unit on the Constitution?  Screech is put on trial.  Zach is his lawyer.  Nikki is the prosecutors.  Mikey is the bailiff.  Lisa is a witness.  The rest of the cast — you know, the dorky kids who don’t get names or storylines — are the jury.

The evidence is stacked against Screech but Zach gets most of it thrown out.  (Nikki may have found a paint brush in Screech’s locker but she had no right to search it.)  The only evidence against Screech is that he said he was going to get Miss Bliss and …. well, he did confess.  Somehow, his confession never comes up at the trial.  That’s a pretty big piece of evidence, even if everyone knows he was pressured into making it.  Screech surprises everyone by taking the fifth when asked why he went to his locker after saying he was going to get Miss Bliss.

Screech is acquitted for lack of evidence.  (Uhmm …. confession?  Hello, he confessed?)  Miss Bliss reveals that she pranked herself to trick the kids into learning about the Constitution.  Because she pranked herself, this mean that she has still never been officially pranked.  After class, she helps Screech open his locker and gets hit by the silly string that Screech previously set to go off.  So, Screech did prank Miss Bliss!

(Wouldn’t Nikki have gotten hit by the silly string when she illegally searched Screech’s locker?)

This episode was dumb.  Screech should have been wrongfully convicted because Zach wasn’t that good of a lawyer.  Unfortunately, Nikki wasn’t that good of a prosecutor either.  That’s the system for you, dagnabit!