DButcher

Contrary to the popular misconception that Mike and Carol Brady of the Brady Bunch were the first married couple to share a bed, this episode is the first episode in the history of series television in which a married couple shares a bed. The "motel" setting freed the convention of the censors, allowing the first realistic depiction of a married couple. On another note, while this is a one-episode occurrence, the first married couple on television to share a bed is still not the Brady family, but is in fact Herman and Lilly Munster.

Nonetheless, this episode provides a fascinating insight into the conventions of television in the 1950s. Ironically, a motel setting is in many ways more suggestive than a home setting. It is also interesting to note that, while the Ricardos may be the first married couple to share a bed together, Fred and Ethel Mertz also share a bed together after the Ricardos.

The show is currently running on Nick-At-Nite, back-to-back with Perfect Strangers.

It is amazing how good the casts of both shows are. It is also equally appalling how bad the scripts are for both shows. These shows have not aged well. Also, has anybody noticed that the filter on the videotape looks very odd? Most of the second-rate (and I use that term not as an insult, but to say that they're not Cheers) sitcoms from the 80's have this peculiar look.

Remember the "video white" look on a lot of early 80's MTV. Compare Toni Basil's Mickey with the video for Men Without Hats' Safety Dance. Both are weird, but the filmed one still looks like it has production values.

This speaks volumes to the superiority of film over videotape. How many television shows lose a quality over time because modern video points out the glaring inadequacies of the medium's past?

The cast of Head Of The Class were a perfect combination in chemistry. It is too bad that the show had to let that cast down in so many other areas.

Very rarely does a game show offer you one epiphanous experience equivalent to the Divine Revelation of St. John, but the game show "Friend Or Foe" has the benefit of not one, but four dramatic insights into human nature. They are as follows:

1. When mankind works together in a spirit of harmony, the mutual reward produces not only material gain, but the feeling of trusting your fellow man.

2. That the world is made for the cunning, and in the wake of those who would deceive, the innocent are caught in their snares and left to languish with the dull-eyed feeling of their own stupidity to warm them. Soon, they return hardened with the lessons of life to make them wiser.

3. Ultimately mutual destruction will beset those who seek to destroy each other, leaving a void of broken dreams to punish those who would do harm to their brother for mutual betrayal leads only to a burden for the wicked.

But the fourth and most important revelation. No matter how much time Viacom (owner of Game Show Network) has to burn off on a back-dated contract from MTV that they acquired in the merger, the only people who will suffer a torment as of being subjugated to horrors of hell are those who have to watch Kennedy in what is the single worst game show of the last 10 years. That includes STUDS.

So the only question you have to ask, probably about twenty minutes into this train wreck, is the following: Would the seas running red with blood really be that bad right about now?