An ‘A’ for Gopher”

Posted on April 30, 2025 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 Wednesdays, I will be reviewing the original Love Boat, which aired on ABC from 1977 to 1986! The series can be streamed on Paramount Plus!

This week, Ted Lange presents three stories of cruise ship love.

Episode 5.26 “Pal-I-Mony-O-Mine/Does Father Know Best?/An ‘A’ for Gopher”

(Dir by Ted Lange, originally aired on April 10th, 1982)

Dr. John Hanson (Ben Vereen) boards the ship with his new girlfriend, attorney Jenny Brooks (Denise Nicholas). John is shocked to discover that his former girlfriend, Ellen (Lynne Moody), is also on the cruise. Jenny befriends Ellen and, after listening to all the details of how Jenny supported John while he was going through medical school, she suggests that Ellen should sue John for palimony. Jenny even offers to help Ellen and John figure out how much John owes her. John agrees. As he and Ellen itemize their former relationship, they come to realize that they’re still in love. Sorry, Jenny! Jenny leaves the boat alone. John and Ellen leave the boat engaged. (Jenny does give them a bill for her legal services. John and Ellen have a good laugh.)

WOW! That’s not the type of story that you regularly see on The Love Boat. It’s rare for a passenger to leave as angry as Jenny did. What’s surprising is that neither Ellen nor John seemed to feel that bad about Jenny getting her heart broken. Then again, what was Jenny thinking when she invited Ellen back into their lives to begin with? This is why you’re never friendly with your significant other’s exes. I don’t care how nice they seem or act. They’re all potential enemies! I don’t care how polite they are when they approach you outside the Dallas Museum of Art and start speaking in their fakeass British accent, don’t trust them …. well, anyway, let’s move on.

Gopher is super-excited when his junior high English teacher, Susan Wilkham (Susan Strasberg), boards the ship. Gopher explains that he’s always had a crush on her and, now that Gopher is an adult, Susan appears to also now have a crush on him. (Don’t freak out, she doesn’t even realize he was a former student until he specifically mentions that he was in her class.) Except …. oh no! Captain Stubing has a crush on her as well! Well, don’t worry. Things work out for Gopher. While Vicki does not get a stepmother, Gopher gets a girlfriend who we will probably never hear about again. Fred Grandy and Susan Strasberg made for a surprisingly cute couple. (It helped that they both appeared to be the same age, despite the show’s effort to cast her as being “the older woman.”) Good for Gopher, it’s about time something good happened to him.

Finally, a father (Lloyd Bochner) encourages his nerdy son (Kevin Brophy) to hit on a beautiful but snobbish blonde (Kristina Wayborn). The son prefers the blonde’s shy best friend (Patty Freedman). On every episode of The Love Boat, there’s one story that doesn’t amount too much and that what this story was.

Hey, this episode was directed by Isaac Washington himself, Mr. Ted Lange! Obviously, The Love Boat isn’t really a show that demands or even allows an auteurist approach but I will say that this was one of the better acted episodes that I’ve seen. Vereen and Moody, Grandy and Strasberg, they all had plenty of chemistry. This was a truly pleasant cruise, despite Jenny’s anger.

Retro Television Reviews: The Love Boat 3.18 and 3.19 “Kinfolk/Sis & the Slicker/Moonlight & Moonshine/Too Close for Comfort/The Affair: Part 2”

Posted on November 29, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, it’s a family affair on The Love Boat!

Episodes 3.18 & 3.19 “Kinfolk/Sis & the Slicker/Moonlight & Moonshine/Too Close for Comfort/The Affair: Part 2”

(Dir by Roger Duchowny, originally aired on January 19th, 1980)

Well, heck, it’s another double-sized, two-hour episode of The Love Boat.

This is actually the third two-hour episode of the third season, following the season premiere and the episode with the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. I have to admit that I don’t really look forward to these two hour episodes because they’re usually a bit uneven. The Love Boat was the perfect hour show, one that featured stories that were specifically designed to be neatly wrapped up in 40 minutes. The two-hour episodes always seem to lose their narrative momentum after that first hour and that’s certainly the case here.

At the center of the episode is Danny Fields (Donny Osmond), a singer who has been booked to perform on the cruise. Julie is convinced that Danny is going to be a big star and she’s even convinced a talent scout named Steve Sorrell (Rich Little) to board the ship so that he can see Danny perform. However, Steve is more interested in Kitty Scofield (Loni Anderson), an innocent West Virginia girl who is eager to see the rest of the world but who is also engaged to marry the unambitious Elmer Fargas (Randall Carver). Kitty is also Danny’s sister and, in fact, Danny’s entire family (played by Richard Paul, Marion Ross, and Slim Pickens) are on the cruise. Danny is worried that his hillbilly family will stand in the way of his rock ‘n’ roll career and he goes out of his way to avoid them. While the rest of the Scofields are willing to accept that Danny doesn’t want to associate with them, Grandpa Luke Scofield (Slim Pickens) lets Danny know that he’s not to happy with Danny and his rock ‘n’ roll ways. Of course, Luke himself is being courted by Brenda Watts (Eve Arden), a writer who wants to write about the Scofield family and who gets close to them by pretending to be from West Virginia herself.

Fortunately, Danny comes to realize the error of his ways, especially after he sees how Steve has been manipulating his sister. At his next performance, Danny introduces his family and sings Country Roads especially for them. Meanwhile, Kitty realizes that she needs to be independent for a while so she dumps both Steve and Elmer, though it’s suggested that she’ll eventually give Elmer a second chance. Brenda comes clean to Luke about not being a hillbilly and Luke eventually forgives her because he’s in love with her and Brenda’s in love with him. Even old Steve turns out to be not such a bad guy, though he does tell Danny that his record label just isn’t looking for any new country acts. Hmmm …. maybe Danny should have stuck with the rock ‘n’ roll. Oh well!

Got all that? I hope so because I’m not typing all that out again.

Meanwhile, Frank (Robert Guillaume) and Maura Bellocque (Denise Nicholas) are taking the cruise with their best friends, Dave (Richard Roundtree) and Cynthia Wilbur (Pam Grier). Frank and Cynthia are having an affair and they aren’t particularly discreet about it. I was expecting Maura to decide that maybe she and Dave should have an affair of their own but instead, she just spent the entire cruise glaring at Frank. This was actually a surprisingly dramatic story, one that did not end with the expected positive outcome. (Is this the first cruise of the Love Boat to end in divorce?) This is a story that demands at least one big, explosive moment but instead, it was all surprisingly low-key.

Finally, the sprinkler system malfunctioned while the boat was in dock and the cabins of Doc, Gopher, and Isaac were flooded. So, they move in with the Captain! The Captain is not amused by Doc’s snoring, Gopher’s New Age chanting, or Isaac’s disco dancing. And when Doc, Gopher, and Isaac all try to bring different women back to the cabin with them, no one is amused by that. I’m not really sure I understand why they all had move in together. Why couldn’t Doc just sleep in his doctor’s office and maybe Isaac and Gopher could have shared an empty passenger’s cabin during the cruise? (Julie did mention that there were some “small” cabins available.) Anyway, the important thing is that they all manage to survive the cruise without killing each other.

This was an uneven episode. The Captain annoyed with everyone as funny because Gavin MacLeod was always amusing whenever he acted annoyed. The storyline with the cheating couple was well-acted, if dramatically a bit unsatisfying. But then you get to all the stuff about Danny and his country family. I know that The Love Boat is not meant to be a realistic or particularly nuanced show but still, Danny’s family was portrayed as being such a bunch of hicks that I was half-expecting them to ask the Captain whether he ever worried about the boat sailing over the edge of the world. Loni Anderson and Slim Pickens gave likable performances but Donny Osmond was incredibly bland as Danny and the scenes where he “performed” featured some truly abysmal lip-synching. It was also a bit difficult to buy Rich Little as a swinger. He came across like he just couldn’t wait to get back home and hang out at the Elks Lodge.

This episode probably would have been fun if it had played out over a compact 60 minutes but, at two hours, things were just stretched a bit too thin.

Retro Television Reviews: Five Desperate Women (dir by Ted Post)

Posted on October 8, 2023 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 Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay. Today’s film is 1971’s Five Desperate Women! It can be viewed on YouTube!

Five women, who all went to college together, reunite for the first time in five years. They’re planning on spending a weekend at a cabin on a private island. Lucy (Anjanette Comer) is the alcoholic who talks too much. Dorian (Joan Hackett) is the pill popper who lies about having a handsome husband and two beautiful children. Joy (Denise Nicholas) is the former activist turned trashy model. Gloria (Stefanie Powers) is bitchy and self-centered. And Mary Grace (Julie Sommars) is the one with the mentally ill mother who refuses to speak to her. Upon reuniting on the dock, the five women all immediately gather in a circle sing an old sorority song. It’s going to be one of those weekends!

The private island is lovely and the women believe that they have it to themselves, with the exception of the two men who are also on the island. Wylie (Robert Conrad) is the caretaker and he seems to be a trustworthy gentleman and exactly the type of guy who you would want to be stranded on an island with. And then there’s Meeker (Bradford Dillman), who drove the boat to the island and who is the type of overbearing jerk who has to be specifically told not to bother the women. While the women stay in the main house, the men stay in the nearby caretaker’s cottage.

From the start, it proves to be a stressful weekend. All of the women have secrets and long-buried resentments that come out at the slightest provocation. Not helping the fact is that there’s a murderer on the island, one that goes from killing a dog to strangling Dorian while the rest of the women are at the beach. The woman, figuring that the murderer has to be either Meeker or Wylie, lock themselves into their house for the night but it turns out that it’s going to take more than a locked door to defeat a killer.

Five Desperate Women has an intriguing premise but it also has an extremely short running time. With only 70 minutes to tell its story and 7 major characters to deal with, the film doesn’t leave much room for character development and, as a result, each woman is only given one personality trait and each actress ends up portraying that trait as broadly as possible. As a result, it doesn’t take long for the movie to go from being Five Desperate Women to Five Annoying Women. As for Robert Conrad and Bradford Dillman, the two of them give effective performances but anyone with a hint of genre savvy will be able to guess who the killer is going to turn out to be. There is one unintentionally funny moment where the desperate women attempt to fight off the killer by throwing rocks at him and none of the rocks come close to reaching their target but otherwise, Five Desperate Women is not particularly memorable.