Retro Television Review: Fantasy Island 7.22 “Surrogate Mother/The Ideal Woman”

Posted on January 13, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

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 the original Fantasy Island, which ran on ABC from 1977 to 1984. The show is once again on Tubi!

It’s time for one last trip to Fantasy Island.

Episode 7.22 “Surrogate Mother/The Ideal Woman”

(Dir by Don Weis, originally aired on May 19th, 1984)

All things must come to an end. For the original Fantasy Island, the final episode of the seventh season was also the final episode of the series.

The show didn’t get a grand finale. Instead, it was a typical episode with two fantasies. In one fantasy, Charo — yes, Charo — played a woman who had been hired to be a surrogate mother for a childless couple (John Saxon and Juliet Mills). In the other one, Ben Saunders (Shea Farrell) tried to win back his ex-fiancee (Mary Kate McGeehan) while judging a Fantasy Island beauty pageant. (How many pageants did Fantasy Island host?) Two men (Don Galloway and David Sheiner) demanded that Ben pick their girlfriends as the Ideal Woman. (Both of the girlfriends materialized on the Island, one from a painting and one from a block of stone. It was a weird fantasy.) Ben picked his ex, declaring her to be the “ideal woman.” Neither fantasy was great, though I will say that Charo gave a surprisingly sincere performance and it was nice that frequent Fantasy Island guests stars John Saxon and Juliet Mills appeared on the last episode. It was an okay trip to the Island, particularly when compared to some of the other season 7 episodes. Still, the whole thing felt a bit tired.

I have to admit that it’s hard for me to believe that I just reviewed the final episode of the original Fantasy Island. I started reviewing Fantasy Island on September 6th, 2022. It was one of the original shows that I picked for Retro Television Reviews. Now that I’m finishing the show up in 2026, The Love Boat is the only one of my original picks that I still have episodes left to review. I’ll be reviewing The Love Boat for a while.

(To be honest, I’m stunned that I’ve stuck with these reviews. I don’t think anyone was expecting me to get all the way to end of Hang Time, let alone Fantasy Island.)

My thoughts on Fantasy Island? I loved the first four seasons. The fifth season, with its introduction of Julie and it’s frequent side-lining of Tattoo, was when the show started to go downhill. The biggest mistake that the show made was, needless to say, not agreeing to pay whatever was necessary to get Herve Villechaize to come back for season 7. Season 7, the season without Tattoo, felt odd from the start. Christopher Hewett and Ricardo Montalban never had the right chemistry and the stories themselves were largely recycled from earlier episodes. The perfect ending for Fantasy Island would have been the season 6 clip show.

What’s next? On television, Fantasy Island was revived twice. In the 90s, Malcolm McDowell played a version of Mr. Rourke. And then, more recently, there was an attempt to revive it on Fox but, after an enjoyable first season, that show became a self-parody. I may review both of them in the future. For now, though, I’m still considering several shows to start reviewing next week. I’ll reveal my pick next Tuesday!

For now, let us say goodbye to Fantasy Island. Thanks for the laughs, the tears, and the fantasies!

Late Night Retro Television Review: Freddy’s Nightmares 1.12 “Deadline”

Posted on October 17, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing Freddy’s Nightmares, a horror anthology show which ran in syndication from 1988 to 1990. The entire series can be found on Tubi!

This week …. oh, who knows?

Episode 1.12 “Deadline”

(Dir by Michael Lange, originally aired on January 29th, 1989)

This week’s first story is about Peter (Aaron Harnick), whose father owns the local Springwood paper and who is given a job for the summer. He’s assigned to write the obits so that he can hang out around the newspaper office and learn from the veteran writers. Peter would rather be in Europe. That’s especially true when he starts to visualize the obits that he’s writing and somehow comes to realize that he’ll die unless he meets his deadline.

This story was the epitome of a good premise that was sloppily executed. Peter hates writing obits but if he doesn’t write the obits, he’ll die in the same way as the person that he’s writing about. He has visions. He has dreams. Unfortunately, both his boss and his girlfriend tell him to stop working on his current obit and to get some rest. But if Peter stop writing, he’ll die! Uhmm …. how long does it take to type up an obituary? I mean, doesn’t he just have to type up whatever dead person’s loved ones sent to the paper?

There’s a clever moment where Peter deletes an old article about Freddy Krueger from the newspaper’s computer system. The episode implies that maybe Peter’s visions are in some way Freddy’s revenge but, as was so often the case with this show, it doesn’t really do much to explore the idea.

The first story ends with Peter dead. The episode’s second story deals with Emily (Page Hannah), a friend of Peter’s girlfriend. Emily has been dating an older college student (Timothy Brantley) and she continually has dreams where her friends — including Peter’s girlfriend — get mad at her for not spending more time with her. In her dreams, her friends all die in a car accident. At the end of the story, it turns out that Emily was just daydreaming. Seriously, that’s the entire story.

What a terrible episode. I usually try to be positive about even the lesser episodes but I have to admit that I’m kind of ticked off that I wasted 50 minutes watching this week’s episode of Freddy’s Nightmares. It felt as the show’s writers didn’t even try this week. Instead, they just came up with some weird scenes and then dismissed them by shrugging and saying, “Hey, it was all a dream. Nothing means anything!”

This episode was just lazy.

Late Night Retro Television Review: 1st & Ten 1.1 “By The Bulls”

Posted on July 16, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Wednesdays, I will be reviewing 1st and Ten, which aired in syndication from 1984 to 1991. The entire series is streaming on Tubi.

For a few years now, first Prime and now Tubi have been recommending that I watch a sitcom called 1st & Ten.

My initial reaction, upon looking the show up online and discovering that it was about a football team that was owned by a woman and coached (from the second season on) by OJ Simpson, was to say, “Why would I want to watch this?” And, to be honest, that’s still kind of my reaction. Football is not my thing. The only thing that is less my thing than football is soccer.

(“But in the rest of the world, soccer is called….” Yeah, yeah, I know. I don’t care.)

But then I read on and discovered that this is actually a historically significant show in that it was HBO’s first attempt to produce an original sitcom. It was later sold into syndication, with all of the cursing and nudity edited out. (Apparently, most of the episodes that are currently on Tubi are the edited syndication versions.) That piqued my interest. I may not care about football but I love historical footnotes.

So, without further ado, let’s get things started.

Episode 1.1 “By The Bulls”

(Dir by Rod Daniel, originally aired on December 2nd, 1984)

The show begins as wealthy Diane Barrow (Delta Burke) comes home to her mansion and discovers her husband, naked in their bedroom with another man. “This is Ty Tylor,” her husband says, “he’s a tight end.”

“I bet he is!” Diane replies.

Later, while talking to her divorce lawyer (Earl Boen), Diane announces, “I want his Bulls!”

“You want his….?” the lawyer replies, glancing down at his crotch.

No, Diane doesn’t want his balls She wants the Los Angeles Bulls, the football team that he owns. When the lawyer replies that Diane’s husband loves the Bulls, Diane announces that if she doesn’t get the football team, she’ll let the world know that her husband’s gay.

(It’s the 1980s, folks.)

Diane gets the Bulls and she also gets a lot of attention due to being apparently the only woman to ever own a football team. Everyone doubts her but Diane is determined to prove herself. However, her sniveling general manager (and her husband’s nephew), Roger Barrow (Clayton Landey), tries to end her ownership before the season even begins by planting cocaine in her mansion, His plan is that, during the pre-season party, one of the players will snort the cocaine and …. I don’t know. I guess he’s hoping some will call the police or something. It doesn’t seem like much of a plan, to be honest.

Fortunately, veteran Coach Ernie Denardo (Reid Scott) hears about the plan from a friend of his so he rushes over to the party and gets rid of the cocaine, though not before letting Diane know that she has powerful enemies. That was nice of him since Diane previously fired him for being incompetent. Needless to say, Denardo gets his job back.

And that’s it! We did get to see a few snippets of the players, who all seem to be wild and wacky. Carl Witherspoon (Sam Scarber) shows up at the party with his lawyer and demands a lot of money. Another player, Kyle Brody (Robert Logan), tries to hit on Diane. I checked with the imdb and this is Logan’s only appearance on the show so I’m not really sure what the point of him being at the party was. It’s a pilot so I imagine that a lot of the background people in this episode will never be seen again.

Overall, my feeling about the pilot was that it …. well, it sucked. The humor fell flat. The acting was terrible. Delta Burke showed some potential as Diane but I didn’t like how, after demanding, “I want his Bulls!,” Diane suddenly became this passive character who needed Denardo to tell her about the cocaine in her mansion. But you know what? It’s always unfair to judge a show by it’s pilot. The Office, for instance, had a terrible pilot. In the end, this particular pilot did what it was supposed to do — it introduced us to the main character and it set up the premise of the show.

We’ll see if things get better in the weeks to come.