A Perfectly Cromulent Blog

"Life's sweetest reward..."

There's a nostalgia post on MetaFilter about The Love Boat, a show I've been unable to purge from my memory banks, in spite of decades spent murdering brain cells to achieve that very result:

If you were a North American kid (well, a kid stuck at home, younger than driving age) in the late 70s/early 80s, your Saturday nights were likely spent in front of the television watching The Love Boat. The show subsequently gained worldwide popularity. Did you know that the Pacific Princess is still ferrying the lovelorn across the blue abyss, and that she has a bridgecam? Did you know there were Love Boat action figures? For your nostalgic pleasure: complete episode guide, complete guest star list, theme song video (variations 1, 2, 3), lyrics and chords, and song facts.

Hey, I was a North American kid stuck at home in the late 70s/early 80s. This post is relevant to my interests.

Here's how Saturday nights went down at our house: Love Boat at 8, Fantasy Island at 9 (my ineptness with the opposite sex can, in part, be traced to the diabolical influence of Aaron Spelling). I'd try to stay awake through the news at 10 so I could watch Saturday Night Live, though I usually started crapping out around 11:45, when the second musical number aired. About half of the time I'd get my second wind in time to watch Monty Python on KUHF at midnight with Dad, but rare was the day I could last to the end of Doctor Who, which started at 12:30.

It isn't like we had a lot of options in 1978, what with a whopping four channels, and yet the subsequent 30 years haven't done a lot to cushion the memory of how bad TV was back then. What's worse, I just spent an inadvertant five minutes watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians and was forced once again to come to terms with the fact that we've gotten a hell of a lot dumber since.

For a while I only retained vague memories of the show itself, and I didn't watch it much after 1982, (my change in Saturday night activities not so strangely coinciding with the onset of my teen years), robbing me of the pleasure of seeing Julie's sister Judy McCoy and the sublime Ted McGinley as "Ace," the ship's photographer. I do remember how great it was that everyone on a cruise ship became your friend for a weekend, and that Bernie Kopell set the improper doctor-patient relationship bar so high even George Clooney couldn't clear it

And then I went to college. There's a huge gap in my TV viewing history for the years 1987-1990, when I didn't own a TV, but as freshmen a group of us regularly fled the confines of UT's Jester dormitory and wandered across I-35 to our friend Kyle's place so we could smoke harmless tobacco and watch shitty TV, including late night Love Boat reruns And if you haven't checked the show out since the advent of AIDS, you really should. Even in 1988, we callow youths were amazed to (re)discover that absolutely everyone on something called a "Love Boat" was making the sign of the two-humped whale.

Every show was the same: Act I introduced "guest stars" like Jamie Farr and Barbi Benton, establishing each of their particular dilemmas. The next two acts portrayed the characters dealing with their own brand of heartache, as well as the burgeoning love they found with their fellow lizard-skinned/lesiure suit-wearing passengers. After the final commercial break came the denouement, invariably leading off with the guest stars (and cast members; that Lauren Tewes got around) leaving the cabin of whomever it was they happened to hook up with at the last evening's formal dance. When you consider that the captain, purser, and cruise director were likely boning a different stranger every week (and Doc Bricker was probably slipping roofies to three times that number), it's hard not to see the Pacific Princess as a potential plague boat.

Of course, our reaction was not: "What a curious juxtaposition between latter-era sexual revolution mores and those foisted upon us by the current chilly sexual climate" but rather the plaintive lament that we were all stuck going to college with a bunch of women who'd been taught that one-night stands were potentially deadly and to be avoided at all costs. Not the kind of females likely to listen to a skeevy ship's bartender telling them to "go for it."

More's the pity.