Life and The Love Boat

The Love Boat, Season 4, Episode 18, "Aquaphobic/Humpty Dumpty/the Starmaker," Feb. 7, 1981.

I never watched a full episode of The Love Boat during its decade-long run starting in the mid-1970s. It seemed a stodgy, shallow show at a time when television comedy was becoming more progressive and experimental, with shows like Mork & Mindy and Saturday Night Live. Today, a Love Boat episode is like a peek back at television's most conservative faction moving reluctantly into a new era. 

In the episode I watched yesterday, Isaac, the moustachioed bartender, learned that a music executive was among the newly boarded passengers, and hoped to be discovered as a singer. He arranged to perform a guest set in the cocktail lounge, and recruited three of the ship’s maids to be his back-up singers. Isaac, it turned out, was not a good singer, but the maids, played by the Pointer Sisters, were very good, so the music executive passed on Isaac and signed the three maids.

Meanwhile, a middle-aged man hoped to overcome his fear of water with the help of his fiancé. Enter Louis Nye, who had played the Drysdale's coddled, Ivy League son on the Beverley Hillbillies and would later play Susie Green's irascible father on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Here, he was an aquaphobe who couldn't venture out of his cruise ship cabin without wearing an oversized, prop lifejacket that looked like it was made from sofa cushions. Shedding the flotation device, according to the story's logic, would signify victory over his phobia. I won't spoil the ending, but the captain and the ship's doctor appear to devote an inordinate amount of time and attention to this single passenger's problem. 

And then there's the former college football star, played by David Hasselhoff — before Knight Rider and Baywatch, and long before that depressing viral video of him dining off the floor — who could not accept that his glory years on the gridiron were behind him. He also is the ex-boyfriend of Julie, the cruise director, and they dabble in rekindling their romance, which is apparently permitted on the Pacific Princess.  

The song Isaac and the sisters performed was "He's So Shy." The first time I heard that song I was sitting in women's strip club in the late '70s with a couple of friends of both sexes. We were there out of ironic curiosity — people did things like that in those days. During a break in the male stripping (short bodybuilders with moustaches and long, dark hair) someone from the crowd selected a song on the jukebox and joined a small group of friends on stage where they sang along with the record. They danced an understated Motown-type choreography and snapped their fingers as they sang; a friendly-looking guy in a preppy cardigan led the group into a dip at the knees at the beginning of each chorus. It looked as if these friends — five or six men and women — had planned this temporary takeover of the stage and had rehearsed these moves beforehand. Moves I would remember some 40 years later.