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!
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.
Through the Shattered Lens 