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

Posted on July 26, 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 …. 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.

What Lisa Marie Watched Last Night #219: Saved By The Bell: Hawaiian Style (dir by Don Barnhart)

Posted on January 2, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Yesterday evening, I watched the 1992 made-for-TV movie, Saved By The Bell: Hawaiian Style!

Why Was I Watching It?

Eh. It was on Netflix. I was thinking about all of the fun that I had when I visited Hawaii. I had just posted my review of Dustin Diamond’s Behind The Bell and I was feeling a little guilty about some of the things I wrote about him. I saw the film was available to watch and I thought, “Why not?”

What Was It About?

The Saved By The Bell gang is spending their summer vacation in Hawaii! Kelly’s grandfather (played by “special guest star” Dean Jones) owns a hotel but …. uh-oh! It looks like the hotel is going to go out of business unless Zack and the gang can fool a bunch of principals (led by their principal, Mr. Belding) to check in.

Along with trying to save the hotel, each member of the Gang gets an adventure of their own!

Zack (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) falls for a single mother (Rena Sofer), who has a rich boyfriend who owns a limo. Zack thinks the guy is shallow and is unimpressed with his wealth. Zack Morris, class warrior? Whatever.

Kelly (Tiffani-Amber Theissen) falls for her grandfather’s lawyer, not knowing that he’s actually working for the rival hotel.

Jessie (Elizabeth Berkley) and Slater (Mario Lopez) try to spend the entire vacation without fighting.

Lisa (Lark Voorhies) makes a bet that Jessie and Slater can’t spend the entire vacation without fighting.

And Screech (Dustin Diamond) is mistaken for a deity by a Polynesian tribe.

Wait, what?

What Did Not Work?

It’s Saved By The Bell …. without a laugh track!

Unfortunately, Saved By The Bell was one of those shows that really needed a laugh track because, without the sound of an audience being ordered to laugh, it becomes next to impossible to ignore just how lame most of the jokes are. Though the cast of Saved By The Bell featured a few talented actors, every single one of them still delivers their Hawaiian Style lines as if they’re waiting for the laughter that never comes. As a result, every “laugh line” is followed by an awkward pause.

As for the show’s plot …. well, let’s put it like this. Traditionally, I start out these posts by discussing what worked before then discussing what didn’t. However, so little works with Saved By The Bell: Hawaiian Style that I felt like it was best to get all of the negative stuff out of the way early. While Saved By The Bell always required a healthy suspension of disbelief, Hawaiian Style abuses the privilege. Saved By The Bell Hawaiian Style asks us to believe the following:

Kelly would be allowed to travel all the way to Hawaii without her parents.
She would be allowed to take along all of her friends, who would also be traveling without parents.
Screech would somehow be invited, despite the fact that no one in the group seems to like him.
Somehow, their high school principal would also turn up in Hawaii at the exact same time.
A single mother would dump her rich boyfriend for a high school junior.
Screech would be mistaken for a Hawaiian God.

Of course, I guess some would say that we should be happy that the Gang was around to save the day but it’s hard not to notice that all of Zack’s schemes are dependent upon some terrible lie. As well, I have to wonder if it was really worth all the trouble to save Kelly’s grandfather’s hotel. I mean, maybe the guy just wasn’t a very good businessman. I would probably be annoyed if I was on vacation in Hawaii with my friends and I was told that I would be spending the entire time working because some guy who was 50 years older than me couldn’t figure out how to balance the books.

This movie apparently aired on primetime television. I wonder how viewers who didn’t know about Saved By The Bell felt when they came across it.

What Worked?

As bad as it was, it was also Saved By The Bell and, as a result, it did have some nostalgic appeal to it. After the movie aired, Saved By The Bell: Hawaiian Style was sold into syndication as four regular episodes of Saved By The Bell and I can still remember seeing them on whatever channel Saved By The Bell was airing on at the time and thinking to myself, “What the Hell?”

The film was shot on location so, needless to say, the scenery was lovely. Mario Lopez and Elizabeth Berkley had a few fun moments as Slater and Jessie tried to go the entire trip without fighting. There were small pleasures to be found. Very small.

“OMG! Just like me!” Moments

When I was seventeen, I spent the summer in Hawaii with my mom and my sisters. It was a lot of fun. Though I don’t swim, I still had a lot of fun laying out on the beach. Hawaii is one of the most incredibly beautiful places that I’ve ever seen. I would sneak out at the hotel at night and then marvel at the scenery during the day. It was one of my favorite summers. Of course, I also didn’t have to spend my vacation helping a bad businessman save his resort. That helped.

Lessons Learned

Apparently, I’ll watch anything.

What Lisa and Megan Watched Last Night #96: Saved By The Bell 2.9 “Jessie’s Song” (dir by Don Barnhart)

Posted on December 28, 2013 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Last night, my sister Megan and I watched the classic 1990 Saved By The Bell caffeine pill episode, Jessie’s Song.

My sister Megan and I stayed up way too late last night but it's her fault for having all the seasons of Saved By The Bell on DVD.

— Lisa Marie Bowman (@LisaMarieBowman) December 27, 2013

Why Were We Watching It?

I was visiting Megan and her family for the holidays, she has every episode of Saved By The Bell on DVD — seriously, how could we not end up watching it?

What Was It About?

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times and things at Bayside High were pretty messed up. Self-declared genius Jessie Spano (Elizabeth Berkley) was failing Geometry so she started taking caffeine pills. Then, her sociopathic friend Zack (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) decided that Jessie should also launch a musical career as a member of the disturbingly generic girl group Hot Sundae. And who can blame him with all of this talent of display?

And so, Jessie started taking more and more pills. And then, this happened…

Fear not! Jessie recovered from her drug addiction in time to be featured in Johnny Dakota’s No Hope With Dope ad campaign.

What Worked?

Jessie’s Song is like The Room of Saved By The Bell episodes, 22 minutes of television that is just so wrong and oddly executed that it becomes oddly fascinating. For that reason, it’s impossible to judge this episode by standard definitions of quality.

The idea that Kelly, Lisa, and Jessie (a.k.a. Hot Sundae) could get a recording contract, the fact that Jessie ends up getting hooked on the equivalent of can of Red Bull, the fantasy sequence where Jessie imagines having to go to Surf U. because she failed Geometry, the fact that a few pills transform Jessie overnight, and the overly optimistic ending; none of it works. And, for that reason, the entire episode works.

Consider this — before I had even seen this episode, I knew that Jessie Spano ended up getting hooked on caffeine pills and singing, “I’m so excited! I’m so excited! I’m so …. SCARED!” For better or worse, this episode is a part of our culture.

On a personal note, I loved the extremely earnest way Mario Lopez delivered the line, “Hold on, Jessie — it says right here that these may be habit-forming…”

What Did Not Work?

As Megan pointed out to me, there’s a huge continuity error in this episode. Back in the glee club episode, it had been established that Kelly couldn’t sing. Now, suddenly, she’s on the verge of getting a recording contract. Was there no such thing as a consistency at Bayside? No wonder Jessie ended up addicted to drugs.

“Oh my God! Just like me!” Moments

Much like Jessie Spano, I have a tendency to push myself. Whereas Jessie pushed herself to attend an Ivy League college and to try to destroy the patriarchy, I push myself to post a certain amount of film reviews each month.

For instance, earlier this year, I decided that I would post at least 120 reviews in October. And so, much like Jessie, I pushed myself and pushed myself and, when I felt like I couldn’t go on, I took every pill that I had in the medicine cabinet and then I danced around my bedroom going, “I’m so excited! I’m so excited! I’m so … scared!”

And some people though that was silly on my part but you know what? This October, the TSL posted 137 new reviews so, obviously, I was doing something right. And I’ve already decided that next year, we’re going to break all previous records. That’s right — 200 posts in October of 2014! You read it here first.

And, to think, I owe it all to caffeine.

Lessons Learned

There’s no hope with dope! Wait … no, actually, that was a different episode. In this one, I guess I learned not to abuse caffeine but I really didn’t learn that because I’ve seen this episode a few dozen times and I’m still addicted to caffeine and, for that matter, I’m still pushing myself and having trouble accepting that I can’t always be the best at everything so maybe I didn’t learn anything from this episode…

Oh wait! I did learn something. Geometry leads to drug addiction and causes you to let all of your friends down.

Seriously, geometry sucks.

(For another look at drug abuse in the 1990s, please be sure to check out my review of the California Dreams steroid episode, Tiffani’s Gold.)

What Lisa Watched Last Night: Saved By The Bell: Wedding in Las Vegas (dir. by Jeff Melman)

Posted on April 28, 2012 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Recently, I spent the night watching a bunch of commercials for Everest College that had been recorded onto my DVR. Occasionally, the Everest commercials were interrupted by 1994’s made-for-tv movie Saved By The Bell: Wedding in Las Vegas.

Why Was I Watching It?

Back when I was like 10, I used to always watch Saved By The Bell: The New Class every Saturday morning. Even at that age, I knew that show was kinda stupid and that Dustin Diamond’s Screech Powers was one of the most annoying television characters of all time. But I still watched it and occasionally, I would catch a rerun of the Old Class as well. (Quite honestly, up until a few years ago, there was never a time that reruns of Saved By The Bell weren’t being broadcast somewhere.) By the time I was in high school, I appreciated Saved By The Bell as being almost a type of performance art.

As of late, it’s been difficult to find Saved By The Bell reruns on television and that made me a little bit sad because I felt like my childhood was disappearing and that I might be turning into an adult. So, imagine how happy I was when I discovered that MTV2 now shows a two hour-block of Saved By The Bell every afternoon and, thanks to the wonderful thing that is the DVR, I can watch them without having to quit my job to do so. Yay!

Two weeks ago, MTV2 showed the final Saved By The Bell movie, 1994’s Wedding in Las Vegas. Though I knew, of course, that Zack (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) and Kelly (Tiffani Amber Thiessen) had gotten married at the end of the original series, I had never actually seen the wedding. And I have to admit that I really didn’t have much desire to see the wedding until it suddenly showed up on my DVR…

What Was It About?

This is one of those rare cases where the film’s title truly tells you everything you need to know. Zack and Kelly get married in Las Vegas while their friends Screech, Slater (Mario Lopez), and Lisa (Lark Voorhees) have wacky adventures of their own. Zack has $1,200 dollars to try to put on his dream wedding but, as often happens in the world of Saved By The Bell, there are countless complications that are largely the result of Zack being a sociopathic pathological liar. Zack loses all of his money but, instead of telling Kelly the truth, he attempts to win the money by becoming a male escort. Meanwhile, Slater falls in love with a girl who is being pursued by the Mafia and Lisa (Hey, I just noticed that we have the same name! Yay!) ends up flirting with a hot guy who has a pony tail and who, fortunately, happens to be as rich as everyone else that she went to high school with.

What Worked And What Did Not Work?

Normally, I separate this into two separate questions but that’s kind of pointless when you’re dealing with something like Saved By The Bell: Wedding Las Vegas. The main thing that works about a show like Saved By The Bell is that absolutely nothing really works. It’s all very silly, shallow, predictable, dated, occasionally cringe-worthy, and, in its way, very calming. Despite the film’s many flaws, it’s difficult to really justify criticizing it too harshly because you know what you’re getting into when you decide to watch something called Saved By The Bell: Wedding In Las Vegas in the first place.

Almost everyone in the cast is really cute in a 90s kinda way and even the usually horrible Dustin Diamond (who I hated even when I was ten years old and watching him on the New Class) is tolerable in Las Vegas. Though the film — much like the series — is focused on Mark-Paul Gosselaar as Zack, I’ve always felt that Zack was overrated. Mario Lopez, with his confident smile and perfectly chiseled body, was (and still is) the hot one. Whereas Zack always seemed to have an off-putting air of entitlement, Slater knew what he wanted and he took it. That trend continues in Wedding In Las Vegas where Slater won’t even let the Mafia stand in the way of getting a date.

This film is technically a comedy though you don’t so much laugh with it as you laugh at it. However, there was one moment that made me genuinely laugh out loud and that was the scene where “the gang” visits a 24-hour wedding chapel and director Jeff Melman gives us a quick tracking shot of the long line of couples waiting to get married. Along with the expected Elvis impersonators, there’s also a very pregnant girl standing next to a scared-looking boy who has an old man pointing a shotgun at him. That made me laugh.

This is yet another one of the shows where every single problem could have been avoided by the characters just not acting like idiots. Seriously, I don’t know what’s worse — that Zack felt that it would be better to become a male escort as opposed to just telling Kelly the truth or that Kelly so quickly forgave him. (Me, I would have been so mad at him but it doesn’t seem to bother Kelly that her future husband lied to her on the night before their wedding.)

As I stated before, there’s a lot that technically doesn’t work about Wedding in Las Vegas but it is Saved By The Bell, after all.

“Oh my God! Just like me!” Moments

If ever get married in Las Vegas, I imagine it’ll be quite a bit like Saved By The Bell: Wedding in Las Vegas, in that I fully expect that 1) I’ll stay at a nice hotel, 2) I’ll get a mani/pedi with my best girlfriend, and 3) the Mafia will somehow be involved.

That said, Dustin Diamond will not be invited to my wedding.

Lessons Learned

Nothing can stand in the way of true love. Especially when you’re rich and white.