Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Thursdays, I will be reviewing Highway to Heaven, which aired on NBC from 1984 to 1989. The entire show is currently streaming on Freevee and several other services!
Jonathan and Mark are once again in Hollywood, bringing yet another family together.
Episode 1.21 “The Brightest Star”
(Dir by Victor French, originally aired on March 6th, 1985)
Despite the fact that Mark was hoping to finally have a vacation from work, the Boss has other ideas. Jonathan and Mark end up picking up a hitchhiking little girl who claims that she’s escaped from an abusive orphanage. It doesn’t take long for Jonathan and Mark to figure out that she’s lying. She’s actually Laurie Parks (Carrie Wells), one of the most in-demand child actresses working in Hollywood.
Hired to do some carpentry at the Parks home, Jonathan and Mark soon start offering advice to the family and indeed, this family needs a lot of help. The family is totally dependent on Laurie’s salary and Laurie deals with the pressure of being the main provider by acting like a monstrous brat. Her alcoholic father (Gerald S. O’Loughlin) wants to return to his previous life of driving a cab. Her mother (Trish Van Devere) spends all of her time watching out for Carrie’s career. The daughter (Laura Jacoby) of the family’s loyal maid (Mary Armstrong) is the selfless angel that Laurie is not and, with Jonathan’s help, she begins her own acting career. Unfortunately, her success comes at Laurie’s expense.
As I watched this episode, I was struck by how familiar it felt. Eventually, I realized that it was reminding me of an earlier episode from season 1, in which a father was the one who neglected his family until his son was cast opposite of him in a movie that was he was shooting. Both of these episodes present Hollywood as being a shallow place, where family is often put second and people are corrupted by the pressures of stardom. Both episodes were critical of Hollywood but ultimately ended with the classic Hollywood story of a new star being discovered from out of nowhere. One gets the feeling that Michael Landon, as the show’s guiding force, was dealing with his own issues of trying balance his career with his family. Highway to Heaven both loves and criticizes the entertainment industry with equal abandon.
As for the episode itself, it wasn’t particularly memorable and it struggled to balance moments of sentimental drama with moments of comedy. One could understand the father’s unhappiness with his situation without necessarily thinking that the solution would be for him to move out of the house and start driving a cab again. In the end, Laurie was such a monster that it was difficult to care about what happened to her one way or the other.
Next week, Jonathan and Mark go up against another heartless corporation!
Through the Shattered Lens 