Sunday, January 23

 

...a dwarf and a dullard...

'Certainly, some Saturday-night programs were pitched so low that they even shamed the rest of the marginally intelligent television schedule and made anyone watching feel even more pained by their lack of social alternatives, adding insult to injury: it's bad enough having nothing to do, but you feel even worse when you find yourselve spending Saturday night watching something as asinine as "Holmes and Yo-Yo." [...] But real marketing genius showed itself in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when ABC scheduled two hours that made up perhaps the ultimate Saturday-night schedule: "The Love Boat," followed by "Fantasy Island." [...T]he first [show was] a series of fey paens to romance on a cruise vessel, and the second a run of baroque [?] morality plays staged by a dwarf and a dullard on a deserted sandbar [...]. It was like having a nationally-broadcast consolation prize for having no such love or social intercourse of one's own to propel one out of the house.'

--Susan Orlean, Saturday Night, 1990.

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