John Innes | 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 Fridays, I will be reviewing Friday the 13th: The Series, a show which ran in syndication from 1987 to 1990. The entire series can be found on YouTube!

This week, it’s Johnny vs the Druids.

Episode 3.19 “The Tree of Life”

(Dir by William Fruet, originally aired on May 7th, 1990)

Johnny randomly runs into a distraught woman who claims that, years ago, her daughter was abducted and her husband murdered by obstetrician Dr. Sybil Oakwood (Gale Garnett). When Jack and Micki doubt the woman’s story, Johnny investigates on his own and discovers that Dr. Oakwood is kidnapping newborn girls and raising them in her fertility clinic. It turns out that Dr. Oakwood is a druid and she’s trying to breed future Druidic priestesses.

(Don’t yell at me, this is the show’s interpretation of druidism.)

This was the next-to-the-last episode of Friday the 13th and it just feels like the writers were tired and uninspired. Suddenly, for the first time in three years, Jack and Micki are skeptical about reports of the paranormal. Johnny is back to being impulsive and, if we’re to be honest, kind of stupid. He tells the distraught mother that her daughter is being held prisoner at the fertility clinic and then is shocked when the mother runs off to the clinic without waiting for Johnny to accompany her. Once again, it all leads to a cult and an underground cavern. This entire episode feels like it was recycled from previous episodes.

I’m not an expert on paganism so I’m not going to get into whether or not this episode accurately portrayed druidic beliefs. I will say that the druids in this episode acted like every other cult that’s ever appeared on this show. They’re just like the Satanic cult that showed up at the end of season 2. Making them druids is probably one of those things that sounded good when the episode was pitched. The word “druid” brings to mind Stonehenge and all the rest of that good stuff. But, narratively, there was nothing gained nor lost by making them druids. The show treated them like any other self-destructive cult.

This episode was a bit dull. It felt like the show was taking one last shot at getting audiences to replace Johnny as Ryan’s replacement. The whole thing just felt uninspired. It certainly left your brave reviewer bereft of inspiration.

Next week, we come to the conclusion of Friday the 13th: The Series.

Norman Lear has television superstar Conrad Bain under contract and Fred Silverman wants to build a show around Bain and a talented black child actor named Gary Coleman. Entitled Diff’rent Strokes and featuring Todd Bridges and Dana Plato as Coleman’s brother and stepsister, the show is a hit. The three young actors briefly become superstars, much like the amazing Conrad Bain. And then, when the show is finally canceled after ten years, it all goes downhill as Todd Bridges and Dana Plato run into trouble with drugs and the law and Gary Coleman, once one of the highest paid stars on television, discovers that he’s now flat broke. All three of them learn how quickly the world can turn on you when you’re no longer considered to be a success.

Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of ‘Diff’rent Strokes’ was another one NBC’s cheap movies about the behind-the-scenes drama of a popular sitcom. (They also did Three’s Company and Mork & Mindy). Like all of NBC’s Behind the Camera movies, it makes the mistake of thinking that everyone is as interested in the habits of network executives as the people who work for them are. (This time, it’s Saul Rubinek who gets to play Fred Silverman.) The actors who plays Bridges, Coleman, and Plato are convincing enough but the storytelling is shallow, featuring the same information that you would expect to find in an episode of the E! True Hollywood Story. I was disappointed that we didn’t get any scenes of Alan Thicke recording the theme song.

Todd Bridges and the late Gary Coleman both appear as themselves, talking about their experiences with the show and the difficulties of navigating life after Diff’rent Strokes was canceled. Bridges is down-to-Earth while Coleman rambles like someone who was still trying to figure out how his life had led up to this moment. The ending, in which Bridges and Coleman stand at Dana Plato’s grave and Coleman delivers a nearly incoherent monologue, is the one time that the film really captures any feeling of emotional honesty. It is obvious that both Bridges and Coleman are still haunted by what happened to Plato after the show ended. Knowing that Coleman himself would die just four years after the airing of this movie makes the scene more poignant when viewed today.