Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Saturdays, Lisa will be reviewing The American Short Story, which ran semi-regularly on PBS in 1974 to 1981.  The entire show can be purchased on Prime and found on YouTube and Tubi.

Episode #10: The Golden Honeymoon (1980, directed by Noel Black)

Hey, guest reviewer here!  Don’t worry, Lisa will return next week.  Next week’s episode has got Eric Roberts in it and she told me there’s no way she’s going to miss that!

This episode is an adaptation of a short story by the author Ring Lardner, who was a member of the Algonquin Round Table and whose son won an Oscar for writing the script for the movie version of M*A*S*H.  The Golden Honeymoon about an old couple (James Whitmore and Teresa Wright) who celebrate their 50th anniversary by going on a “golden honeymoon” to Florida.  While there, they meet the wife’s old flame (Larry Loonin) and Whitmore feels like he has to win his Wright all over again.  Whitmore and Loonin play a lot of different games, like shuffleboard and checkers.  You know you don’t want to get between a group of elderly people playing checkers!  Wright gets frustrated with Whitmore but they make up by the end of the episode.  They bicker but they love each other.

I have not read the original short story on which this episode is based.  Ring Lardner was famous for his wit and he probably could have found a lot of comedic moments in two old romantic rivals having an intense checkers game.  The episode itself reminded me of those films that my high school English teachers would always show in class.  “You are going to love this,” the teacher always says and then the members of the class sit there in stony silence as they watched the slowest, most visually static program imaginable.  This episode was not just boring.  It was PBS boring.

I don’t want to be to negative, though.  I like both James Whitmore and Teresa Wright.  Whitmore was the elderly prisoner in The Shawshank Redemption.  Teresea Wright was in several classic Golden Age  films.  In The Golden Honeymoon, they were believable as an old married couple, who constantly argue but still clearly love each other.