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 Saved By The Bell, which ran on NBC from 1989 to 1993.  The entire show is currently streaming on Prime and Tubi!

This episode, a select few are getting married.

Episode 1.12 “The Mamas and the Papas”

(Dir by Don Barnhart, originally aired on November 11th, 1989)

For a class project, the students are all spending a week seeing what it’s like to be married.  What’s odd is that there are only three couples despite the fact that there are a bunch of other students in the class.  Basically, six people are taking part in the project and the rest of the class is just there to watch.  That sounds like an incredibly boring week for the rest of the class but whatever.

Zack has been paired up with Kelly.  Slater has been paired up Jessie.  Lisa has been paired up with Screech.  When Lisa complains about having to be Screech’s wife, Mr. Belding says that the couples were selected alphabetically.  However, if that were true, Screech Powers would be married to Jessie Spano and A.C. Slater would be married to Lisa Turtle.  Seriously, Mr. Belding’s a liar.  How much did Screech pay him?

Lisa starts to twitch violently whenever Screech is near.  When Screech announce that he’s moving into her bedroom, she nearly has a seizure and, quite frankly, I don’t blame her.  This is a terrible class project.  Because the project is putting Lisa’s health at risk, she is allowed to annul her marriage to Screech.  Yay!  Instead, she is reassigned to be Slater and Jessie’s daughter while Screech becomes Zack and Kelly’s son.  When Kelly sees how negatively Zack reacts to being Screech’s father, she wonders if he’s the man to whom she wants to be fake married.

The stuff with Kelly and Zack and Lisa and Screech is pretty dumb.  Slater and Jessie is where the action’s at.  This is the first episode to really establish that Slater is a sexist pig and the Jessie is a straw feminist.  Jessie wants to keep her maiden name.  Jessie wants to have a job outside of the home.  Jessie feels that she should be an equal partner in the marriage.  What’s funny is that I agree with Jessie on all of these matters and yet I still laughed whenever Slater said, “Oink oink, baby.”  That’s largely due to the fact that Jessie was written to be so strident and shrill that her feminism and her politics often felt rather performative.  Slater may have been a chauvinist but at least he was honest about it and he was loyal to his friends.  Plus, he was cute.  (It’s high school, folks.  People are shallow in high school.)

This episode ends with Jessie apologizing to Mr. Belding for not being able to make her marriage to Slater work.  Belding says that sometimes, two people just aren’t meant to be together and there’s no shame in that.  (As a child of divorced parents, I always appreciated the fact that this episode was honest about the fact that not every marriage can be saved.)  Zack and Kelly’s marriage survives, at least until the project ends.

This episode …. actually, it really wasn’t that bad.  By the standards of Saved By The Bell, it was actually one of their better episodes.  As a general rule, the more time that is spent with Jessie and Slater fighting, the better the episode.  Still, forcing Lisa to marry Screech …. that’s just mean.