TV Land PRIME blog

In this, the final installment in my reunion trilogy (though I reserve the right to have a Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in the future, only with a less complicated MacGuffin), I am all about television show reunions. 

There are two kinds: the fictional ones, like where the gang gets together to write Alan Brady his eulogy, and the non-fictional ones where the cast gets together on a fake living room set and talks to the audience while showing clips and desperately not trying to mention that Tori and Shannen hate each other. 

On the fictional side: It’s fun to watch an actor re-assay a role, especially a child star, who starred in a recurring childhood dream in which you beat him up, who gets older and marries a former MTV Veejay trying to act. I speak of course of Mike Lookinland as disabled racecar driver Bob Brady, whose wife Tracy was played by Martha Quinn. I know, there’s something wrong with me, because I didn’t have to look on the imdb for Mrs. Bobby Brady’s first name.  

Sometimes, the fictional reunions are cringe-worthy. I died inside when I had to turn off The Dick Van Dyke Show Revisited, and was sad that Mary and Rhoda was more syrupy than a table at IHOP. Maybe the problem with those reunions was not the shows themselves but the age at which I watched them. I may have been too cynical and lacking in wonder in my 30s. 

At 11, however, I was still obsessed with Mrs. Wally Logan and Mrs. Philip Covington III in The Brady Girls Get Married. I remember that Friday night in my neighbors’ house on Birdwood Street watching everyone Brady reassemble. Sherwood Schwartz got it right then, unlike the later reunion movies (see above Looklinland paragraph) and the melodramatic Bradysomething. 

Sherwood Schwartz also personally provided young Sammy Buck with not one but THREE Gilligan’s Island reunions, though sans Tina Louise. Judith Baldwin and Constance Forslund were less optimal Gingers in those movies (once again, I am kinda embarrassed to say I didn’t have to look those names up on the imbd), and Bob Denver looked frighteningly old and most likely on the ganja as Gilligan, but I loved the Love Boat-ization of the Island with The Castaways on Gilligan’s Island.   

Long before the days of DVR, I had to wait to see the second airing of Rescue from Gilligan’s Island because it was on at the same time that my family was leaving our Lake Conroe vacation house to head back to Houston. They wrenched me away from the TV set at the time share, and I PITCHED A FIT.  Seriously, never cried harder at the injustice a 9-year-old could feel. When I finally did get to see the science-defying flying superhut that led the seven stranded castaways to safety, I fell in love with the concept of reunions. 

I think alot about which fictional characters I would like to see reunited.  I have often mentioned my obsession with Soap. Though with Cathryn Damon and Richard Mulligan dead, how would the Campbells fare?  Maybe Betty Buckley and Dick Van Patten could play the roles and we could get in an Eight is Enough reunion as well. 

So, onto the non-fictional reunions.