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 the Canadian sitcom, Check it Out, which ran in syndication from 1985 to 1988.  The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi and Peacock!

This week, Howard continues to dream of a better job.  Good luck with that, Howard.

Episode 3.2 “Hey, Take Me Over”

(Dir by Alan Erlich, originally aired on  October 10th, 1987)

Cobb’s has been sold!  Because the new owner is a huge corporation that owns several luxury resorts, Howard convinces himself that he’s going to be promoted to running a hotel in Tahiti.  (Howard’s background in hotel management has been one of the few consistent things in Check It Out.)  Instead, corporate vice president T.C. Collingwood (Elizabeth Hanna) comes down to the store and tells Howard that he needs to start wearing a smock that says “Howie, Store Manager” on it.

Howard does what any reasonably immature, 50ish man would do.  He quits.  But then Edna explains that Howard will lose his pension if he quits so Howard decides that maybe wearing the smock won’t be so bad.  “You’re throwing away your future,” Edna says at one point, as if Howard isn’t clearly approaching the age when most people retire.

This episode really drove home one of the biggest issues with Check It Out!, which is that Howard was written to be an ambitious man in his 40s but he was played by Don Adams who, when the show began, was already in his 60s.  Now, it should be admitted that Adams looked about ten years younger than his actual age but still, Howard comes across as a bit too old to still be fantasizing about suddenly changing careers.  There’s a principle that everyone rises to their level of incompetence.  They keep getting promoted until they reach a job they can’t do and then, they get stuck there.  Howard’s level of incompetence appears to be working as a general manager of a grocery store.

Howard eventually does put on the smock and agrees to keep working at his job.  What’s odd about this is that Howard was already wearing the smock during the previous episode.  Obviously, the episodes that made up the final season of Check It Out! were not aired in their intended order.

For all of the flaws to be found in this episode, it was still better than the majority of the second season.  It would appear that, with season 3, the show’s producers and writers finally settled on Howard being an incompetent manager and the store being a mess.  That’s definitely the right way to go.  When it comes to workplace sitcoms, incompetence is always funnier than hypercompetence.  (Just consider the U.S. version of The Office, in which the funniest episodes featured the office in chaos and the cringiest episodes were always the ones the centered on how good Jim was at selling paper.)  No one respects Howard and Howard has no idea how to do his job.  That’s a lot funnier than whatever the second season was trying to do.

Finally, I should mention that T and T‘s Sean Roberge has a small role in this one, playing the new bagboy.  If I’ve learned anything from doing these retro television reviews, it’s that, in the late 80s, syndicated Canadian television shows really did seem to share the same small pool of actors.