Current Events > Been watching The Love Boat. Kinda miss chill, down to earth storytelling on TV

(+) Yeah! (+)

Like each episode of The Love Boat is a set of interwoven stories taking place on a cruise ship. The stories are different every week, focusing on all facets of romance from courtship to marriage to divorce, with a defined beginning, middle and end. It takes up an hour-long block factoring in time for commercials, and overall it's been pretty entertaining - a good mix of cornball humor, on-screen chemistry and emotional stakes.

Nowadays everything's serialised. Some shows are episodic with an ongoing personal storyline between the main cast, like Boston Legal or the Blacklist. It's been like that for a while. Otherwise, I feel like the only shows that are syndicated and episodic - with the occasional status quo shake-up - are stuff like The Simpsons and Family Guy.

Like idk, there's something to an anthology format like the Love Boat. You have a framing device with the crew, but you focus on an ever-changing cast of characters with their own quandaries and whatever issues the crew face are about as transient and immediate as the stories at hand.

The first episode of the show had the Captain confronted by his ball-busting ex-wife, with one of the three stories being about standing up for his own integrity and eventually patching things up, still divorced but with both having moved on amicably. The episode I'm on now has Julie, the cruise director, necking with this guy who's leading a "Life Begins At 60" group - only for their fling to be continuously interrupted by the rowdy seniors. We're not talking about engagement on the same level as Friends and How I Met Your Mother, but the cast has character and they get time in the spotlight as they ebb and flow through the continuing stories of their passengers. All of those stories are a part of them and they're familiar and entertaining to watch, but it's not like the continuing misadventures of Ross and Rachel.

That being said, having seen the IMDB page, I don't doubt that the main characters have their own storylines and stuff in future seasons - maybe some characters find love for good. But the focus on the show, to my knowledge, continues to be about this ever-rotating cast of cruise passengers. There's something refreshing about how self-contained each episode is, enjoying each episode as its own story on its own merits. You don't see a lot of that any more.

Like when I think about just about any live-action show that's stuck in my brain over the course of my life - Boston Legal, Eli Stone, Ugly Betty, Gray's Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, Crossing Jordan, Medium, Dirty Sexy Money, House, Lie to Me, the Blacklist, Bull, Hung, Lost among others - there's always that part of the show that's about the characters themselves, then perhaps a broader, episodic plot in the case of House, Boston Legal, Medium and the Blacklist among others, before resolving whatever was plaguing the main characters all episode. And it's not bad at all; I like some of those shows, and I'm planning to watch others on that list. But what I'm seeing of the Love Boat is scratching an itch that I didn't know I had. It's concise, self-contained storytelling.

idk, maybe there's room for amateur writers to cut their teeth on episodic TV like that. Everyone wants to be the next prestige series, even after that bubble burst years ago. Sometimes it's nice to see something transient and immediate, a story that you pick up at the start and drop off at the end. It's tacky and cheap, but it's a lost art.

I'm also surprised at how much of the original cast is still alive. I guess most of the cast were pretty young in 1977 but outside of the Captain, who himself was middle-aged when the show began, I think just about everyone is still around. Like with that trashy Love Boat themed reality TV show, they brought the cast back to give the contestants tasks to do and stuff - it might be a shitty reality show, but the cast are not only still around, but they're still willing to do Love Boat-related stuff to this day. I read that they've done periodic appearances together ever since the show ended, too. I'm happy to see it - good for them.

It probably begins to recycle plots and stuff the longer it goes on, but I still think it's a relic of a more efficient and cozy era of television. Networks want a Titanic or a Mission Impossible on a Days of our Lives budget and half of the episode order - but not everything has to shock and awe the viewer. Not everything can be the first season of True Detective, or the entire run of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Low-stakes nonsense is nice to watch too.

Make your shit episodic and syndicate it, make the individual episodes stand on their own, and try and write stakes that mean something to the characters in the moment. And for my money, try and write seperate stories and seperate characters from week to week. Shows like King of Queens and According to Jim have their charm and are comfortable in their own right, but again, there's something to the anthology format that I feel like I've been missing.

It's like watching real-world people with real-world problems, like you're watching people's lives unfold instead of the ongoing misadventures of Doug Heffernan, slobby everyman who's designed to appeal to my sensibilities and string me along from episode to episode. Not even reality shows have that sort of thing going, because forming ongoing narratives and character arcs has been a thing in reality TV since at least Survivor.

That's my piece. It's almost 4.30 am here and I've just found my limited experience with the Love Boat to be really refreshing. I like how every episode is about a new group of people and their problems, and I appreciate that for an hour-long airing block every week, multiple writers had to write multiple stories that would eventually end up being filmed and portrayed side by side with each other, working as a cohesive whole for that episode before doing the exact same thing the next week.

Long story short, I'm being a nerd.

My mom loves that show! Ive seen a bunch of it over the years and it does have a nice comfy feel to it. The theme song is great too

I also watch reruns of this. I have a channel called catchy comedy that plays tons of these shows that I grew up on and Love Boat is on every weekday at 3 pm. Lots of other shows I grew up watching too that I watch on there. I watch reruns of more tv from the 70s and 80s than I do modern tv.

I used to get busy to that show, cpt stuubing was a hunk

It's that melody in the theme song that's outta sight lol
https://youtu.be/062iPop49vc?si=YpGRcotgZgSBZPM3

But what I'm seeing of the Love Boat is scratching an itch that I didn't know I had. It's concise, self-contained storytelling.

Stuios & producers don't want to pay writers anymore. Not in any manner resembling decency.

Looked up the love boat tag on Tumblr and found an okay meme:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/0/4/1/AAbh80AAE02R.jpg

M*A*S*H is my go-to series for this kind of storytelling, personally