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, Christian gets married!

Episode 2.21 “Here Comes The Bride”

(Dir by Alan Erlich, originally aired on March 15th, 1987)

Jack Christian (marvelously played by Jeff Pustil) is getting married!

He’s known the girl (Barbara Radecki) for twenty minutes and he’s not totally sure what her name is.  (It’s turns out to be Gilga.)  Gilga is the niece of Jan (Barry Baidero), the store’s never-bef0re-seen butcher.  When Jack first meets Gilga, she’s crying.  Her visa has expired.  The only way that she’s going to avoid being sent back to her home country Baclavia is if she manages to get a Canadian green card.  One quick way to do that is to get married.  Jan offers to pay Christian to marry Gilga and then divorce her after she gets her green card.  Christian agrees.

However, there’s a problem.

Christian is actually falling in love with Gilga but he doesn’t know how he can convince Gilga that his love is real.  Howard tells him that the only way to do it would be to give back the money.  That sounds simple enough but Christian really likes money.  Plus, he needs a new car….

(Maybe he could just stay married to Gilga and so charm Jan that Jan would buy him a new car just to welcome him to the family.  The possibility of anyone sincerely liking Christian is never really considered, which is kind of sad.)

This episode was fairly dumb but it was more enjoyable than the usual Check It Out! offering, if just because it focused on one of the show’s few consistently funny characters.  Since the first season, Jeff Pustil has been one of the stronger members of the cast, playing Christian as being such an unapologetic sleaze that it’s impossible not to like him.  No one should ever trust Jack Christian but he still comes across like he would be fun to catch a movie with.  Unfortunately, up until this episode, the show rarely took advantage of Pustil’s strong work as Christian.  This episode finally gives Pustil the spotlight and he manages to wring quite a few laughs out of so-so material.  Much like Gordon Clapp and Kathleen Laskey (who played Marlene and married Pustil after the show ended), Jeff Pustil brought enough odd quirkiness to his role that he often transcended the show’s scripts.

Along with giving Jeff Pustil a chance to show off, this episode also featured several never-bef0re-seen employees of Cobb’s.  They show up for Christian’s bachelor party and the wedding, both of which take place at the store for some reason.  I’ve often wondered how a major supermarket managed to survive with only two cashiers and one bagger.  (It often seemed strange that Howard had a secretary but apparently not a janitor.)  This episode revealed that a lot of people worked at Cobb’s, the viewer apparently just never noticed them before.

This was a rare good episode.  Next week, we conclude season two!