Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Wednesdays, I will be reviewing the original Love Boat, which aired on ABC from 1977 to 1986!  The series can be streamed on Paramount Plus!

This week, it’s a family affair on The Love Boat!

Episodes 3.18 & 3.19 “Kinfolk/Sis & the Slicker/Moonlight & Moonshine/Too Close for Comfort/The Affair: Part 2”

(Dir by Roger Duchowny, originally aired on January 19th, 1980)

Well, heck, it’s another double-sized, two-hour episode of The Love Boat.

This is actually the third two-hour episode of the third season, following the season premiere and the episode with the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders.  I have to admit that I don’t really look forward to these two hour episodes because they’re usually a bit uneven.  The Love Boat was the perfect hour show, one that featured stories that were specifically designed to be neatly wrapped up in 40 minutes.  The two-hour episodes always seem to lose their narrative momentum after that first hour and that’s certainly the case here.

At the center of the episode is Danny Fields (Donny Osmond), a singer who has been booked to perform on the cruise.  Julie is convinced that Danny is going to be a big star and she’s even convinced a talent scout named Steve Sorrell (Rich Little) to board the ship so that he can see Danny perform.  However, Steve is more interested in Kitty Scofield (Loni Anderson), an innocent West Virginia girl who is eager to see the rest of the world but who is also engaged to marry the unambitious Elmer Fargas (Randall Carver).  Kitty is also Danny’s sister and, in fact, Danny’s entire family (played by Richard Paul, Marion Ross, and Slim Pickens) are on the cruise.  Danny is worried that his hillbilly family will stand in the way of his rock ‘n’ roll career and he goes out of his way to avoid them.  While the rest of the Scofields are willing to accept that Danny doesn’t want to associate with them, Grandpa Luke Scofield (Slim Pickens) lets Danny know that he’s not to happy with Danny and his rock ‘n’ roll ways.  Of course, Luke himself is being courted by Brenda Watts (Eve Arden), a writer who wants to write about the Scofield family and who gets close to them by pretending to be from West Virginia herself.

Fortunately, Danny comes to realize the error of his ways, especially after he sees how Steve has been manipulating his sister.  At his next performance, Danny introduces his family and sings Country Roads especially for them.  Meanwhile, Kitty realizes that she needs to be independent for a while so she dumps both Steve and Elmer, though it’s suggested that she’ll eventually give Elmer a second chance.  Brenda comes clean to Luke about not being a hillbilly and Luke eventually forgives her because he’s in love with her and Brenda’s in love with him.  Even old Steve turns out to be not such a bad guy, though he does tell Danny that his record label just isn’t looking for any new country acts.  Hmmm …. maybe Danny should have stuck with the rock ‘n’ roll.  Oh well!

Got all that?  I hope so because I’m not typing all that out again.

Meanwhile, Frank (Robert Guillaume) and Maura Bellocque (Denise Nicholas) are taking the cruise with their best friends, Dave (Richard Roundtree) and Cynthia Wilbur (Pam Grier).  Frank and Cynthia are having an affair and they aren’t particularly discreet about it.  I was expecting Maura to decide that maybe she and Dave should have an affair of their own but instead, she just spent the entire cruise glaring at Frank.  This was actually a surprisingly dramatic story, one that did not end with the expected positive outcome.  (Is this the first cruise of the Love Boat to end in divorce?)  This is a story that demands at least one big, explosive moment but instead, it was all surprisingly low-key.

Finally, the sprinkler system malfunctioned while the boat was in dock and the cabins of Doc, Gopher, and Isaac were flooded.  So, they move in with the Captain!  The Captain is not amused by Doc’s snoring, Gopher’s New Age chanting, or Isaac’s disco dancing.  And when Doc, Gopher, and Isaac all try to bring different women back to the cabin with them, no one is amused by that.  I’m not really sure I understand why they all had move in together.  Why couldn’t Doc just sleep in his doctor’s office and maybe Isaac and Gopher could have shared an empty passenger’s cabin during the cruise?  (Julie did mention that there were some “small” cabins available.)  Anyway, the important thing is that they all manage to survive the cruise without killing each other.

This was an uneven episode.  The Captain annoyed with everyone as funny because Gavin MacLeod was always amusing whenever he acted annoyed.  The storyline with the cheating couple was well-acted, if dramatically a bit unsatisfying.  But then you get to all the stuff about Danny and his country family.  I know that The Love Boat is not meant to be a realistic or particularly nuanced show but still, Danny’s family was portrayed as being such a bunch of hicks that I was half-expecting them to ask the Captain whether he ever worried about the boat sailing over the edge of the world.  Loni Anderson and Slim Pickens gave likable performances but Donny Osmond was incredibly bland as Danny and the scenes where he “performed” featured some truly abysmal lip-synching.  It was also a bit difficult to buy Rich Little as a swinger.  He came across like he just couldn’t wait to get back home and hang out at the Elks Lodge.

This episode probably would have been fun if it had played out over a compact 60 minutes but, at two hours, things were just stretched a bit too thin.