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 the Canadian sitcom, Check it Out, which ran in syndication from 1985 to 1988.  The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi!

This week, Viker needs help!

Episode 2.16 “The Oddest Couple”

(Dir by Alan Erlich, originally aired on February 8th, 1987)

Viker has been kicked out by his wife, Mrs. Viker (Laura Henry).  Mrs. Viker apparently doesn’t have a first name.  Even Viker calls her “Mrs. Viker” whenever he talks to her.  Because he has been kicked out of his house, Viker has started sleeping on Howard’s couch.

Howard tells Viker that he can’t sleep on his couch, which just leaves Viker with one other option.  He moves in with Howard!  Normally, I’d wonder how Edna would feel about this but Edna is not in this episode.  In fact, there’s no mention of Howard being involved and his apartment suddenly looks like a tacky bachelor pad.  He even has a round bed in the living room.

As you can guess by the episode’s title, Howard and Viker make for an odd couple.  It’s not a case of one of them being a neat freak and one of them being a slob.  In fact, they’re both pretty neat.  It’s just that Viker can be a little weird.  He gargles extremely loudly.  He takes everything that he hears literally.  He spends a lot of time talking about his bunions.

Howard attempts to bring Viker and Mrs. Viker together but, when Mrs. Viker catches Viker teaching Marlene how to dance (more about that in a minute) in the store’s aisles, she declares that she can’t trust Viker.  But then Howard invites Mrs. Viker to his apartment, where he has prepared a romantic dinner for the Vikers.  That’s all it takes for the Vikers to fall back in love and apparently have sex in Howard’s living room bed while Howard waits in the hallway outside.

Why is Viker teaching Marlene how to dance?  Because a good-looking customer named Philip (Richard Hardacre) has asked Marlene to come to his country club!  Marlene gets all dressed up, does her hair nicely, and looks forward to her date.  But then Richard shows up looking like he’s the bassist in Sex Pistols cover band.  Richard says that it’s “punk night” at the country club and he wanted to impress his friends by bringing “an actual punk.”  Realizing that she was being used, Marlene tells Richard to get lost and then she, Murray, and Christian go out for pizza.  Awww!  Since this show usually features those three characters at odds, it’s kind of nice to see them all going out as friends in this episode.

(In real life, Kathleen Laskey, who plays Marlene, is married to Jeff Pustil, who played Christian.  Even though their characters are usually rivals, the chemistry between the two performers is obvious.)

This was an okay episode.  It made me chuckle a few times.  It’s obvious that, after the first half of the second season, the showrunners realized that Don Adams and Gordon Clapp made a great comic team.  Check It Out is a show that works best when it embraces absurdity and few characters are more absurd than Gordon Clapp’s Viker.