Late Night Retro Television Review: Good Morning Miss Bliss 1.3 “Wall Street”

Posted on August 2, 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 Saturdays, I will be reviewing Good Morning, Miss Bliss, which ran on the Disney Channel from 1988 to 1989 before then moving to NBC and being renamed Saved By The Bell. The entire show is currently streaming on Prime!

This week, Miss Bliss makes the mistake of trusting her students. Zach Morris also learns a lesson about the Stock Market. Mr. Belding learns better than to try to be nice to Miss Bliss. It’s quite an episode!

Episode 1.3 “Wall Street”

(Dir by Burt Brinckerhoff, originally aired on December 14th, 1988)

Mr. Belding is concerned. Miss Bliss is teaching her class a lesson about Wall Street. Each of her students has donated $2 and the money has been used to buy a safe and dependable stock. Belding doesn’t think that it’s good for the students to invest real money but, as usual, Miss Bliss just smirks away his worries.

However, Zach needs $300 to pay for a video camera that he damaged. With the help of his friend Mickey (Max Battimo), Zach breaks into the classroom, gets on the computer, and invests the class’s money in potatoes. He buys the stock on margin. So, of course, when the stock tanks, Miss Bliss ends up owing $1,500.

“You just cost me my new car!” Miss Bliss angrily exclaims.

What car was Miss Bliss going to buy for $1,500? It sounds like maybe they did Miss Bliss a favor, to be honest.

Miss Bliss gets angry and storms out of her classroom. Mr. Belding comforts her and tells her that she’s a good teacher. He jokes that something even worse will probably happen in the future. Miss Bliss snaps that he should have just said, “I told you so.”

This exchange between Mr. Belding and Miss Bliss gets right to the heart of why I can’t stand Miss Bliss. Mr. Belding is trying to help. He compliments her. He tells her that this sort of thing happen to every teacher. He attempts to lighten the mood with a joke. And Miss Bliss snaps at him. Miss Bliss is someone who has no problem dismissing everyone else’s problems but, once something goes wrong for her, the entire world is supposed to stop. Mr. Belding didn’t say “I told you so,” because Mr. Belding isn’t a condescending know-it-all, unlike a certain teacher who no longer afford a new car.

I liked this episode. The overwhelming smugness of Miss Bliss meets the overwhelming self-absorption of Zach Morris. The end result is Miss Bliss doesn’t get a car but she does get a bag of potatoes. Miss Bliss even forgives her students for stealing from her. To be honest, Zach is in the 8th Grade and most 8th Graders know better. Add to that, Zach sneaks into the school to buy those potatoes. Again, this is not typical 8th Grade behavior. It might be time to get this kid some professional help because God knows what he’s going to be like when he reaches high school….

Late Night Retro Television Review: Good Morning, Miss Bliss 1.2 “Love Letters”

Posted on July 26, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week …. well, it’s all really stupid.

Episode 1.2 “Love Letters”

(Dir by Burt Brinkerhoff, originally aired on December 7th, 1988)

Miss Bliss thinks that Mr. Belding has sent her a love letter! Mr. Belding thinks Miss Bliss had sent him a love letter! Much awkwardness follows. Of course, the truth is that they both have a love letter that Zach wrote to Lisa (the character, not me) on behalf of Screech. Screech, meanwhile, writes Zach’s term paper on the War of 1812, which is probably the easiest war to write a paper on. I mean, if Zach can’t handle the War of 1812 on his own, he really is doomed.

This was a dumb episode, one that was later remade as an episode of Saved By The Bell during the infamous Tori season. The remake even went as far as to have Zach write a love note to Lisa for Screech and Mr. Belding and another teacher thinking that the note was written for them. Somehow, no one stopped and said, “Hey, hasn’t this happened before?” The remake was just as dumb as the original.

I will say this. Dustin Diamond is actually …. dare I say it? …. likable in this episode. Watching this episode, I could actually understand why Diamond was at the center of so many early episodes of Saved By The Bell because it appears that, before he started doing the squeaky, cartoonish voice thing and got totally typecast as the most annoying person on the planet, Dustin Diamond actually was a good child actor. There’s a sincere sweetness to his crush on Lisa in this episode. It’s quite a contrast to the deranged stalker that he would later become.

I should also note, for Saved By The Bell historians, this episode is the first to establish that Screech has a crush on Lisa and that Lisa, who is kind of mean in this episode, wishes that Screech would get lost. At the start of the episode, Lisa stuffs Screech in a locker. That seems a bit extreme to me. It’s always struck me as strange how the people on these shows were always getting stuffed into lockers. I went to a lot of different schools when I was growing up and I never once saw that happen to anyone. And yet, on Saved By The Bell and a host of other Peter Engel-produced sitcoms, it’s like a daily occurrence. I would think that it can’t be healthy to be stuffed in a locker. I can’t imagine the air quality is very good inside one of those metal caskets.

This episode also presents Screech and Zach as not being the childhood friends that Saved By The Bell later presented them as being. (Indeed, Screech mentions that no one will believe that he and Zach are actually friends.) Then again, this episode also takes place in Indiana instead of California so I guess it’s best not to worry too much about continuity.

On the How Condescending Is Miss Bliss scale, this episode score a solid 7 out of 10. She wasn’t anywhere near as a condescending as she would be in some of her later episodes but her comment when Mr. Belding asks her for the identity of the person who actually wrote the letter — “Why should I tell you? You just dumped me.” — pushes the score up to a 7.

Next week, Miss Bliss loses a lot of money when she stupidly allows the kids to invest it. What a terrible teacher. We’ll see what happens!

Late Night Retro Television Review: Good Morning, Miss Bliss 1.1 “Summer Love”

Posted on July 19, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

With Check It Out! finished, it’s time to review a new show. Continuing this feature’s tradition of highlighting the work of executive producer Peter Engel, it’s time for Good Morning, Miss Bliss, the show that would eventually become Saved By The Bell!

Episode 1.1 “Summer Love”

(Dir by Burt Brinckerhoff, originally aired on November 30th, 1988)

It’s the first day of school at JFK Junior High, located in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana.

Miss Carrie Bliss (Hayley Mills), our narrator, is looking forward to a new year as a history teacher. The school’s principal, Richard Belding (a surprisingly thin Dennis Haskins) is worried about a new year of out-of-control students and angry parents. Miss Bliss’s best friend, Ms. Tina Palladino (Joan Ryan), worries that Mr. Belding has given her a bad schedule because of a disappointing school play she directed the previous year.

Miss Bliss has a date, the first one since her husband died. Brian (Barry Jenner) is handsome and successful but romance will have to wait as Miss Bliss deals with the problems of her homeroom students. Over the summer, pathological liar Zack Morris (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) told a girl named Karen (Carla Gugino, in one of her first roles) that he would soon be starting the 9th grade. Of course, Zack is actually starting the 8th Grade but he figured that he would never see Karen again so why not…. oh my God, this kid is a terrible human being! Anyway, Karen transfers to JFK and Zack has to pretend to be in the 9th Grade. He does this despite the fact that all of his friends, Mickey (Max Battimo), Nikki (Heather Hopper), Lisa (Lark Voorhees), and the nerdy Screech (Dustin Diamond), are in the 8th Grade and Zack’s homeroom is in an 8th grade classroom.

Got all that?

Needless to say, this episode would not be remembered today if not for the fact that it was the first appearance of Mr. Belding, Zack Morris, Lisa Turtle, and Screech Powers. These characters were, of course, later retconned to be Californians when Saved By The Bell started. Miss Bliss did not make the transition to California and for that, we should all be happy. Even in this first episode, Miss Bliss comes across as being a self-righteous know-it-all who obviously feels that she’s too good for a junior high in Indiana. In her first scene, she brags about getting a good class schedule, dismisses Tina’s concerns about her own class schedule, and then smirks as Mr. Belding talks about his anxiety. This would pretty much be Miss Bliss’s signature style for the rest of the short life of Good Morning, Miss Bliss.

How do our regulars do in their first appearance as the characters that would make them famous? Dennis Haskins gives a semi-realistic performance as Belding, playing him as being a harried pencil-pusher as opposed to the cartoonish figure he would become later on. Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Lark Voorhies do well-enough as Zack and Lisa, though both of their characters are far more simpler here than they would become later. Dustin Diamond was only 11 year old when he was cast as Screech and he looked and comes across as being several years younger. (I recently saw an interview with Mark-Paul Gosselaar where he explained that the main reason why Diamond struggled to fit in with the rest of the cast was because he was considerably younger than everyone else on the show. I would say that he was probably too young. Imagine looking back on your life as an actor and realizing that you were permanently typecast by a role you first played when you were 11.)

Anyway, this was a forgettable but historically important episode. Just imagine if it had never aired.