Jayne Schipper | Through the Shattered Lens

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 features some adorable kittens!

Episode 3.16 “My Hero, Mr. Bannister”

(Dir by Jayne Schipper, originally aired on January 3rd, 1988)

Stockboy Derek (Andrew Miller) admires Howard and decides that, in order to be like his idol, he’s going to drop out of high school and devote himself to becoming manager of a grocery store. Howard has to show Derek has stupid that would be. Fortunately, Derek comes to his senses by the end of the episode. No one wants to grow up to be Howard.

This was a weird episode, largely because everyone acted as if Derek was a regular member of the cast despite the fact that this was only his second appearance on the show. (He appeared earlier in the season, in yet another episode that was devoted to his character.) One of the oddest things about this season is that it keeps introducing characters who seem like they’re going to be regulars — Howard’s brother, the executive from the company that bought Cobb’s — but who then never show up again. Or in Derek’s case, they showed up on more time. Seen today, all of these episodes feel like backdoor pilots for shows that were never actually put into production. That doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily bad episodes, of course. While Derek’s storyline was a bit forgettable, the third season has still been a marked improvement over the first two.

This episode featured a B-plot about an adorable cat named Marvin who decided to live in the store with “Mrs. Marvin.” They had kittens! And the kittens were adorable. I’m a cat person so I enjoyed that. Otherwise, this episode was fairly forgettable.

This week, corporate sends a visitor to Cobb’s for reasons that are never exactly clear.

Episode 3.10 “Shrink From Sendrax”

(Dir by Jayne Schipper, originally aired on November 15th, 1987)

I’m just going to do a mini-review of this episode because I’m busy working on our big St. Patrick’s Day extravaganza here at the Shattered Lens!

Remember that new company that bought out Cobb’s? It can be easy to forget about them. Well, in this episode, they send a psychiatrist named Dr. Matthews (Graham Harley) to check on everyone’s mental health. Why would they do that? I mean, is Cobb’s grocery store really that important to them? It seems like a lot of money to spend on checking whether or not the cashiers are feeling good about themselves.
Admittedly, I haven’t had that many jobs and I’ve never worked in a grocery store. If you told me that I had no choice but to sit down and talk about my life with a psychiatrist as a condition of my employment, I would probably quit. It’s not that I have anything against psychiatrists. It’s just that I believe therapy should always be voluntary.
The episode’s highlight was Leslie wanting to spend hours talking to the psychiatrist about the party that was thrown when he turned two years old. Aaron Schwartz, who is often underused on this show, really got a chance to show off his comedic skills in this episode.
Gordon Clapp’s Viker also got a few good scenes. In general, any episode that features Clapp is, at the very least, going to make me smile.
Howard freaks out over the psychiatrist and the questionnaire that he’s forced to fill out. He gets some advice from 14 year-old stockboy Brad, played by T and T‘s Sean Roberge. This is Brad’s third appearance on the show and I get the feeling that he was originally meant to be a major character but the show’s writers couldn’t figure out what to do with the character.
This third season has had a lot of weird detours and characters. We haven’t heard anything else about Howard’s brother. The corporate liaison, TC Collingwood (Elizabeth Hanna), is occasionally pictured in the opening credits and occasionally not. What happened to the stockboy who had a crush on Marlene?
Anyway, to prove that he’s not crazy, Howard dresses up like a clown because he knows that only way to prove he’s not crazy is to act crazy while realizing that he’s acting crazy or something.
Marlene and Christian, the two most consistently interesting characters on the show, were not in this episode and that kind of made the whole psychiatry angle feel useless. The idea of Marlene and Christian reacting to ink blots is such a good one that I personally would have delayed production on this episode until Kathleen Laskey and Jeff Pustil were available to appear in it.

Gordon Clapp and Aaron Schwartz were great but, overall, this was pretty dumb episode.