Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Tuesdays, I will be reviewing Saved By The Bell: The New Class, which ran on NBC from 1993 to 2o00. The show is currently on Prime.
This week, the Gang gets a summer job! Why would anyone want to work during the summer? What a bunch of losers.
Episode 2.2 “All Work And No Play”
(Dir by Don Barnhart, originally aired on September 10th, 1994)
It’s summer time! (During its second season, Saved By The Bell: The New Class aired two episodes each Saturday morning. One episode would be a high school episode while the other would feature the Gang off-campus.) Mr. Belding has been hired to manage the Palisade Hills Country Club. The first mistake that Belding makes is that he hires Screech to be his assistant. Then he allows Screech to hire Brian, Bobby, Tommy, Rachel, Megan, and Lindsay as his staff.
Thinks quickly go downhill.
- While trying to show-off for Rachel, Brian attempts to drive a golf cart with his feet. (“This is how I steered snowmobile in Switzerland,” Brian says.)
- Assigned to wash and wax the car belonging to club owner Ed Harrington (Frank Bonner), Tommy D and Lindsay instead take the car for a joyride, which leads to Brian denting it with the golf cart.
- The car has a dent and the paint job is scuffed. Tommy works out the dent and then repaints the car with Rachel’s nail polish. To help the polish dry, Tommy and Brian remove the car’s front panel, take it to the country’s club’s kitchen. and unplug the freezer so that they can instead plug in a huge fan.
- Whoops! They forget to plug the freezer back in and $4,000 worth of food goes bad.
- Bobby can’t drive but still tries to cover valet parking.
- Screech is too busy falling in love with Ed’s daughter, Allison (Clare Slastrom), to be of any help.
Mr. Belding does the right thing and fires all of them. But then the Gang decides to throw a Luau for the club’s members (instead of the county and western barbecue that was originally planned) and it’s such a hit that Belding hires them back.
Seriously, what the Hell? Yes, the Gang saved the day but they only had to save it because they were so grotesquely immature and irresponsible in the first place. This was one of the worst recurring plotlines to appear on Saved By The Bell: The New Class. Someone would get a new job, they would totally screw it up, they would get fired, and then they would get rehired just because they felt bad after the fact. Personally, I think that if you steal a car, destroy a golf cart, and cause $4,000 worth of meat to go bad, you should be fired. I don’t care if you then put on a hula skirt and play a ukulele and and put on a little Hawaiian performance on a sweltering day in the middle of the desert. You’re fired.
GO HOME!
This episode annoyed the Hell out of me. I can accept a lot from this show but what I can’t accept is a plot where every complication could have been avoided by everyone not being a massive dumbass.
Through the Shattered Lens 