#burl gopher smith

[molotovgrifter]

yeoman purser smith what a good wife you would be

[drarreckyninja]

Doc: Talk dirty to me~ Gopher: Inflation is a serious problem and lumber prices are at a high. Doc: Wha- Gopher: The economy is in shambles.

[lizard-speed]

@ everyone who said radar was trans i’m sorry for doubting you he is by far the most trans character on television since mr purser burl “gopher” smith

[eclecticanalyst]

We’re Expecting You...To Boldly Go [part 2]

In my last post, I expounded on the similarities in the general premise and structure of The Love Boat and Star Trek: The Next Generation, two shows that on the surface seem not to have much in common but on closer examination have some unexpected similarities. In my follow-up post on this theme, I will be drawing parallels between the main/regular characters of both shows. The crew lineup on each ship can be broken down into six character functions/profiles: The Captain, The Captain’s Confidant, The Big Brother, The Two Buds, The Chick, and The Kid.

The Captain

Star Trek TNG: Captain Jean-Luc Picard

The Love Boat: Captain Merrill Stubing

“The Captain” is...the captain! Beyond his role as the primary authority figure, he can be characterized in the following ways. Being the one to whom the rest of the crew reports, he is a bit socially removed from the rest of the main characters. While they can pal around with each other, they still treat him with a bit more deference even as he comes to be just as integral a part of their found family as the rest of them. The Captain can be rather intimidating at times—especially in the early days, when he had a tendency to be overly gruff with his crew. Part of that gruffness is the fact that he has very high standards for the people who serve under him. At the same time, however, he cares deeply for those people and is willing to put himself on the line for them, even bending the rules a bit in order to help them out of a difficult spot. He’s full of thoughtful advice should one of his crew ask for it, and is the most likely of the crew to give speeches about moral responsibility. He also has a playful streak, which he keeps under wraps but uses to mess with his crew from time to time. In terms of appearance, he’s older than the rest of the cast and he is bald(ing). He’s played by the best actor of the cast—Patrick Stewart is, of course, Patrick Stewart, I don’t think I really need to say more there, and Gavin MacLeod was a veteran actor (probably best known at that point for his role as Murray on The Mary Tyler Moore Show), able to handle both the comic and the dramatic whenever needed.

The Captain’s Confidant

Star Trek TNG: Dr. Beverly Crusher

The Love Boat: Dr. Adam “Doc” Bricker

I could have called this character profile “The Doctor,” following the same pattern as “The Captain,” but there was another aspect to Beverly and Doc that I wanted to draw attention to, beyond their being the respective healers of their crews. Both Beverly and Doc have a slightly different relationship with the Captain than the other members of the crew. They are a bit closer to the Captain, able to address him easily as a friend instead of as a superior officer if the situation calls for it. Notice that when working, Beverly will address Picard as “Captain” and “sir,” but when it’s just the two of them chatting in a more intimate setting she calls him “Jean-Luc.” Beverly is also one of the few people on board that Picard is comfortable with opening up to regarding his own insecurities or worries, while he takes more care to maintain his “self-assured captain” persona with everyone else. The same dynamic plays out between Stubing and Doc: there are several instances of Doc addressing his friend as “Merrill”—which none of the other members of the crew would even consider doing—and the power difference between the two is not as pronounced as it is between the captain and the other crew members. Whenever Captain Stubing has a personal problem, he goes to Doc for advice, and vice versa. Dr. Crusher and Captain Picard have a history, having been friends long before he took command of the Enterprise. In the same vein, Doc seems to know Captain Stubing’s past more intimately than the rest of the crew, as there are a few episodes in which the two of them discuss Captain Stubing’s alcohol addiction and current status as a teetotaler as if this is something Doc has always known about Merrill.

The Big Brother

Star Trek TNG: William Riker

The Love Boat: Adam “Doc” Bricker

So this is cheating a bit because I already have Doc listed under a character profile above, but TNG’s main cast has more people than that of TLB, so a one-to-one mapping wasn’t going to happen anyway. Doc’s “Captain’s Confidant” role deals with his relationship with the captain, and his “Big Brother” role deals with his relationship with the rest of the regulars. The fact that Doc is a bit older than Julie, Isaac, and Gopher means that even though he, like the rest of them, is under the supervision of the captain, he has a slight position of seniority over the other three. He balances the by-turns mischievous and responsible aspects of an older brother figure—he’ll tease Julie about her latest infatuation, and set up elaborate pranks to mess with Gopher, yet whenever Gopher and Isaac get swept up in some not-well-thought-out scheme, he’s the level-headed one who tries to point out that they’ve gotten carried away—or sometimes refuses to get involved altogether. William Riker is, of course, first officer of the Enterprise, and therefore has the same seniority-among-underlings position (in a more official chain of command capacity than Doc does). His big-brother-ness manifests as the poker-playing, jazz-loving guy who will do things like give Worf’s son music recordings that he knows Worf will hate one day but get actively upset and almost personally offended at the idea of Data getting hurt the next.

Not necessarily related to the “Big Brother” role, but another little parallel between Doc and Riker that I would like to point out—they are each the designated ladies’ man of their ships, yet both are able to completely switch to focusing solely on their job responsibilities the moment it is called for. (Honestly, Doc always struck me as going beyond “ladies’ man” and skirting dangerously close to “creep” territory at times, but I did appreciate how he would always drop everything the instant there was any sort of medical issue on the Princess.)

The Two Buds

Star Trek TNG: Geordi La Forge and Data

The Love Boat: Isaac Washington and Burl “Gopher” Smith

Although both the TNG and TLB crews form a group of close friends, The Two Buds are best friends. They are the two most likely people to hang out together in their down time, the two who understand each other the best, the two most sympathetic to each other’s problems and most likely to indulge the other long after everyone else would have put their foot down. When Gopher gets some conspiracy theory into his head about a passenger, Isaac will hear him out and sometimes even help him investigate. When Data wants to do some questionable experimentation on his positronic net, Geordi is there with a tricorder making sure the whole thing doesn’t go completely haywire. Data once said that he didn’t know what a friend was until he met Geordi, and Isaac once told Gopher that he (Gopher) is the only one Isaac would resign in solidarity for. All four men/androids have a tendency to get a little too wrapped up in their obsession of the week—see Isaac’s novel-writing attempts, Geordi’s holographic Leah Brahms, Gopher’s conspiracy theories, and about half of anything Data does.

Each pair also consists of one white guy and one Black guy. (Obviously, Data is an android and therefore is not technically any human race or ethnicity, but he’s played by a white guy and his artificial skin is paler than anyone else’s skin on the senior staff.) The white guy representatives, Gopher and Data, are almost polar opposites—Data is calm and logical, and Captain Picard trusts him implicitly, while Gopher is a goof who freaks out easily and who is often upset with the way Captain Stubing dismisses him (those dismissals are especially prominent in the first few seasons—Gopher does mellow out later on). But they do have some similarities, one of the most striking being that they both struggle with appropriate social behavior as well as their own emotions. This is more readily apparent with Data, of course, who is literally not human and is trying his best to understand the nuances of things like humor and love, constantly asking his friends to explain behaviors they take for granted. Gopher’s struggles are more understated—he has a tendency to make comments and observations that the rest of the crew find slightly tasteless, he goes into several anxious tailspins over the course of the show, and he at one point believes his emotional attachments to his friends compromise his ability to fulfill his job duties. Both Data and Gopher use their respective best friends—each of whom are the more level-headed of the pair—as a steadying force.

Now for the characteristics shared by those respective best friends. The Black guy’s job responsibilities root him in a specific place and often set him slightly apart from the main action. While Geordi can and does go up to the bridge on several occasions, as Chief of Engineering he spends most of his time hanging around the warp core, communicating with the bridge over the com system. Meanwhile, Isaac can be seen wandering hallways and so forth, but he spends most of his time behind the bar, whether that’s in the Acapulco Lounge, on the Lido Deck, or in Pirate’s Cove. The rest of the crew, despite having nominal work stations like the Enterprise bridge or the Pacific Princess purser’s lobby, are seen to roam more extensively. (I’m pretty sure we never see Julie’s office.) Isaac is busy serving drinks in pretty much every episode while Doc and Gopher are chatting and dancing with passengers on the dance floor of the Acapulco Lounge. The Black guy also gets the short end of the stick in the romance department. When you see a Black guest actor on the opening credits of The Love Boat, it’s a good bet that Isaac will be involved in their storyline. If it’s just one Black woman, there’s a 99% chance that Isaac will be involved in her story, and his involvement will be as her love interest. I remember one particularly glaring example of the show going to extreme lengths to avoid even hinting that Isaac could potentially do something vaguely romantic or sexual with a white woman—Julie’s hosting her high school reunion on the ship, and there are a few scenes where everyone is discoing in the Acapulco Lounge. Isaac gets out on the dance floor, and conveniently some random Black woman appears out of nowhere as his dance partner. This woman is not named or acknowledged at any other point in the episode. Over on the Enterprise, Geordi isn’t restricted along race lines like Isaac, but I find it highly suspicious that the one Black guy is the least successful in romance out of everyone on the senior staff. Geordi struggles to even start up a conversation with women he’s attracted to, let alone flirt with them. Data has a better romance track record than Geordi does, and Data usually ends up in a romantic entanglement by accident! It’s as if the show was afraid to let Geordi enjoy those kinds of relationships to the same degree as the rest of the crew, which is a different kind of restriction than Isaac’s, but still a restriction nonetheless.

The Chick

Star Trek TNG: Deanna Troi

The Love Boat: Julie McCoy

The standard lineup for both TNG and The Love Boat consisted two female main characters, thus allowing the ladies to gossip about “girly” things in keeping with gender stereotypes, but Vicki was a preteen/teenager and Beverly had a sort of matron vibe going on, which left Julie and Troi to be the respective sex appeal characters out of the main cast. The Chick has non-standard dress that sets her apart from the others and their status as officers. While Doc, Gopher, and Captain Stubing wore nautical stripes and white uniforms (and Isaac usually had a variation on this outfit, wearing a red or blue jacket), with very little in the way of costume changes whether they were greeting boarding passengers, chatting on the Lido deck, or dancing in the Acapulco Lounge, Julie had no stripes to speak of. She would wear a (feminine) uniform at boarding, switch to a casual outfit during the rest of the day, and was always wearing a gown of some sort in the evenings. Deanna Troi for her part cycled through purple jumpsuits and asymmetrical dresses, her Starfleet badge precariously pinned to her neckline. We didn’t even get to see the pips indicating her rank until she was finally given (in story, ordered into) a normal uniform in season six.

The Chick gets saddled with way too many romance plots, some creepier than others. Giving Troi something substantial to do in an episode usually consisted of making her the love interest of whoever happened to be boarding the Enterprise that week, like the ambassador with the telepathic interpreters or the quarter-Betazoid interplanetary negotiator. Deanna also got her mind invaded by a man who was interested in her, prematurely aged by a man who took advantage of her, and kidnapped by Ferengi (who have a disturbing species-wide infatuation with non-Ferengi women). I’m not as upset about Julie having several romance-related plots, as romance was the name of the game on The Love Boat and the men on the crew had their own share of romantic entanglements—but I do find issue with the fact that when Julie was in love she always seemed on the verge of getting married and leaving the ship, which was a vibe we didn’t really get from, say, Doc or Gopher when their love lives turned particularly intense. In terms of creepiness, Julie had to deal with fending off the extremely aggressive advances of Captain Stubing’s uncle, a computer programmer who rigged his dating algorithm to ensure he matched with her, and a college acquaintance of Gopher who actually came to her door to badger her as she was getting dressed.

The Kid

Star Trek TNG: Wesley Crusher

The Love Boat: Vicki Stubing

For some reason, both of these shows thought it necessary to have a preteen/teenager in the cast whose character has way more responsibility than is realistic for either a cruise ship or a pseudomilitary starship. Instead of Vicki wearing a uniform and checking in guests on the Pacific Princess, we really should have seen Julie’s or Gopher’s staff fulfilling check-in duty (Doc and Isaac were also too often seen checking in passengers, which I will say again is a duty that on a real cruise ship would definitely not fall to either the ship’s doctor or chief bartender, but we’re talking about Vicki at the moment). Wesley, meanwhile, was made Acting Ensign on the Enterprise, saving the ship way more than he should have and probably earning the ire of all the official ensigns who actually went to Starfleet Academy and were losing precious time at the conn due to Picard’s favoritism.

Speaking of Picard, The Captain has a paternal relationship with The Kid—literally in Vicki Stubing’s case, emotionally in Wesley Crusher’s. He is very concerned with imbuing The Kid with strong morals, and has a vested interest in The Kid’s upbringing and making sure The Kid has a bright future. Meanwhile, the rest of the main crew are like an assortment of aunts and uncles, being the cool, approachable sources of advice when The Captain’s not around. In fact, The Kid hardly seems to have any friends their own age. Instead, they hang out with the adult crew members and get involved in their social drama, which may or may not have always been appropriate.

Isn’t there someone you forgot?

The TNG fans among you may now be thinking to yourselves, “What about Worf?” Alas, there seems to be no satisfactory Worf counterpart on The Love Boat. After all, there isn’t really any need for a tactical officer on a cruise ship, so a warrior-type personality is not represented on the Pacific Princess crew. Other Worf characteristics would be that of an outsider, or one who is occasionally not sure if they truly belong on the ship, but everyone on the Princess seems pretty happy to be there. I guess in a pinch I could say Ace, the late-addition ship’s photographer, might serve as Worf’s counterpart, but other than the fact that Ace’s family is rich and it is established that he doesn’t really need a job on the ship to get by, I’m not sure there’s much of an “outsider” status brought to the table here. I also haven’t watched enough Ace episodes to have a really good read on his character.

 Thus ends my Love Boat/TNG comparison! It was nice to finally get this analysis out of my head and onto the page.

[pasttenselibrarian]

1. The original crew of The Love Boat (ABC, 1977-’86) included, from left, yeoman purser Burl “Gopher” Smith (Fred Grandy), bartender Isaac Washington (Ted Lange), Captain Merrill Stubing (Gavin MacLeod), Dr. Adam Bricker (Bernie Kopell), and cruise director Julie McCoy (Lauren Tewes).

2. Jill Whelan (second from right) joined the cast in the show’s third season as Stubing’s daughter, Vicki, while Ted McGinley (third from left) hopped onboard as the ship’s photographer, Ace Evans, in season seven, and Patricia Klous (second from left) replaced Lauren Tewes as Judy McCoy, Julie’s sister, in season eight.

3. The real-life “love boat,” the Pacific Princess, was operated by Princess Cruises from 1975 to 2002.

[narcisbolgor-blog]

‘The Love Boat’ cast reunites on ‘Today’ more than 40 years after show first aired

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'The Love Boat' cast reunites

More than 40 years after the show first aired, the original cast of the beloved 1970s TV series 'The Love Boat' reunited on the 'Today' show. The cast had just received an honorary star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in partnership with Princess Cruises.

All aboard! The cast of "The Love Boat" is back on deck. 

On Friday morning, the original cast of the beloved 1970s TV series "The Love Boat" reunited for one more cruise on the "Today" show. 

More than 40 years after the show premiered, the famous cast ‒ including Gavin MacLeod, Ted Lange, Bernie Kopell, Lauren Tewes, Jill Whelan and Fred Grandy ‒ appeared on the morning show live from Los Angeles, where on May 10 they received an honorary star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in partnership with Princess Cruises.  

For their reunion, MacLeod, known for his iconic role of Capt. Merrill Stubing, donned his signature captain hat while Lange, who played the ship's spirited bartender Isaac Washington, sported his signature red jacket and mustache. Koppell, who played the ship's doctor, Adam Bricker, wore his signature specs. 

"The Love Boat" cast awaits the unveiling on their Hollywood Walk of Fame Star.  (AP)

Also in attendance was the ship's cruise director, Julie McCoy, played by Tewes, the captain's angelic daughter; Vicki, who was played by Whelan; and Grandy, who played Yeoman Burl Smith but was known for his character nickname, "Gopher."

Prior to reuniting on "Today," the cast sat down with morning hosts Hoda Kotb and Savannah Guthrie to talk about the significance of the classic TV show in May of last year.

Video

'The Love Boat' celebrates its 40th anniversary

When asked how often the cast gets together, Whelan said, "We were all together last night at my apartment." 

But the fun-loving cast, who went on to tape eight seasons of the hit series, admitted that they didn't know that the show was going to be a success when it first aired in 1977, produced by Aaron Spelling. 

"We got the worst reviews," Koppell said. 

The show's cast on the "Today" show on May 23, 2017.  (AP)

According to MacLeod, he knew right from the start "The Love Boat" was classic material. "We had a reading in the office, just the guys. And we finished the reading ... and I'm walking down and a guy says, 'Well, I hope this goes well," and I said, 'I'm telling you we're gonna go at least seven years.'"

Grandy said the show turned out to be such a success partly because there was nothing like it on the air.

"It was romance, at the time there were only cop shows and sitcoms on the air," he said. "So, this show filled some kind of need that only Aaron Spelling understood." 

You can find Morgan M. Evans on Twitter @themizfactor.

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Lauer caught on tape

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Original Article : HERE ; This post was curated & posted using : RealSpecific

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[libero-de-mente]

The Love Boat angelico

Love Boat è una serie televisiva statunitense, ambientata su una nave da crociera, prodotta tra il 1977 e il 1987. La serie si svolge usualmente sulla nave Pacific Princess, in cui i passeggeri e l'equipaggio hanno avventure romantiche e divertenti. La particolarità della serie era costituita dal fatto che il cast dei passeggeri, che cambiava di puntata in puntata, era costituito da attori molto conosciuti, per la maggior parte negli Stati Uniti d'America. I personaggi fissi della serie erano i membri dell'equipaggio, ossia il capitano Merrill Stubing, la direttrice di crociera Julie McCoy (sostituita nelle ultime stagioni da Judy McCoy), il barista Isaac Washington, la figlia del capitano Vicky Stubing (aggiuntasi successivamente), il dottore Adam Bricker e Burl Gopher Smith. Questi personaggi fissi avevano ruoli e caratteri ben definiti. Famoso è l'episodio in cui a bordo della Pacific Princess salì Alberto Angela, l'episodio si intitolò "La crociera divulgosa", dove per tutto il tragitto anziché balli, canti e gioco d'azzardo si parlò di paleontologia applicata alla vecchia fattoria di zio Tobia, la geologia applicata agli strati dei panini McDonald's e l'archeologia all'interno dei centri di bellezza. In quell'episodio, poi, Alberto Angela relegò il Comandante Stubing nella sua cabina, prendendo il comando portò la nave fino al centro di Roma per visitare le catacombe.

[drarreckyninja]

Gopher: So we're gathered here today for a very special reason and I think you'll all agree with me here. Gopher: And if you don't well then fuck you. Gopher: I'm looking at you, Doc, you jealous mop.

[drarreckyninja]

Doc: Until I've got things more figured out, you're the only person I'm telling, okay?

Gopher: Well, I'd love to hear them sometime. Your songs

Doc: Yeah?

[lizard-speed]

Since I subjected ya’ll (how dramatic, ya’ll) to my MTMS edition of gayness here’s a new one!

I present: Let’s See How Gay Malcolm Can Make This Old TV Show: The Love Boat Edition!

Captain Stubing: Heteroflexible (he/him)- very likely to change, events have occurred which are making me change my mind

Doctor Adam “Doc” Bricker: Non-binary (he/him) polyamorous omnisexual (I’m reconsidering the polyam hc though)

Yeoman Purser Burl “Gopher” Smith: Gay trans man (he/him)

Isaac Washington: Bisexual man (he/him)

Julie McCoy: Sapphic-oriented aroace (she/her) 

Vicki Stubing: Pansexual demigirl (she/they)

[eclecticanalyst]

We’re Expecting You...To Boldly Go

[or, a fun exercise in comparing The Love Boat to Star Trek: The Next Generation]

I’ve always had a fondness for shows that aired several decades before I was born. When I was a kid, I loved the TV channel Boomerang, because it broadcasted classic cartoons like Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! and Snorks and The Jetsons. As I entered my preteen years, I graduated to live-action, checking out DVD box sets of The Facts of Life and Fantasy Island and The Love Boat from the library.

I don’t know if other people in my generation are familiar with The Love Boat—it was a television show that ran on ABC from 1977-1987. The show took place on a cruise ship, the Pacific Princess, and a typical episode would begin with the Princess leaving out of its home port of Los Angeles, proceeding to such stops as Cabo San Lucas and Puerto Vallarta before ultimately returning to Los Angeles at the end of the hour. The Love Boat’s claim to fame was its rotating roster of guest stars (with a new lineup in each episode), who were a mix of contemporary actors/celebrities (like Jim Nabors, Florence Henderson, and Sonny Bono) and old Hollywood/Broadway royalty (like Gene Kelly, Ethel Merman, and Zsa Zsa Gabor). These guest stars would provide the Pacific Princess with its passengers. There was a regular cast of characters that helped anchor (pun intended) the show—Merrill Stubing, ship’s captain; Adam “Doc” Bricker, ship’s doctor; Burl “Gopher” Smith, assistant yeoman purser; Isaac Washington, chief bartender; and Julie McCoy, cruise director. Vicki Stubing, the captain’s teenaged daughter, was added to the cast in season 3. In the final few seasons, Julie was replaced by her sister Judy, and the ship gained a photographer in Ace–full name Ashley Covington Evans. (Also, every so often, a guest star would play a member of the crew, like the gift shop manager or the chef, rather than a passenger.)

A standard episode was divided into three storylines that played out simultaneously over the course of a cruise. The vast majority of the storylines were romance-based, but there were others that consisted of family drama or old friends getting together. The regular cast members would participate in the passengers’ stories to varying degrees, sometimes being an integral part of the plot and sometimes only existing on the sidelines. The storylines would all get resolved by the time the Pacific Princess returned to Los Angeles, and the passengers would (almost always cheerfully) disembark, usually never to be seen again. Plotlines did not carry over from one week to the next, and even if a guest star returned in a later episode, chances were they would be playing a completely new character.

Although the guest cast took up the majority of the screen time, I was always more invested in the regulars, and wished we could spend more time with them—learning their backstories, exploring their dynamics with each other, and watching them actually do cruise ship work instead of pal around with the passengers. Because of The Love Boat’s near-anthology setup, not much effort was put into any sort of ongoing character development. Intense romances on the main cast’s part one week would be completely forgotten the next week, family deaths wouldn’t be brought up until it was relevant to that episode’s storyline, and new details about the crew’s past would be added as plot points, even sometimes directly contradicting a previous episode.

(The Love Boat had other issues that have less to do with my criticism of the writing and more to do with an adherence to certain flawed social practices, like how Isaac's love interests were always Black, or how single mothers were greeted with raised eyebrows, or how people of Asian or Latino/a descent were accompanied by specific musical cues–but these issues are not the point of this post so I won’t get into them at this time.)

Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered the year The Love Boat went off the air—1987—and ran until 1994. I only got into Star Trek in college, and TNG was my first series as it was easily available on BBC America. Although it had been several years since I had watched The Love Boat on a regular basis, one day a connection was made in my mind, and it occurred to me that there were a great deal of parallels to be drawn between a certain rom-com/drama at sea and a certain sci-fi adventure in space. I kept this observation in my head for years, but now that I have a blog (and because I have been rewatching a few episodes of The Love Boat in the past few weeks), I have decided to write out all of these parallels in detail.

First: the basic setup. The main cast is the crew of a ship, but we only really meet a handful of the hundreds of actual crew members needed to run the ship. In The Love Boat, for example, we don’t see the engineering crew, but the Pacific Princess must certainly have one in order to function, and although we do sometimes see Captain Stubing hanging out on the bridge, we don’t even know the name of the first officer. As I mentioned above, occasionally a guest star would play a crew member in an episode, acting as if they’d been there the whole time, but we would never see them again after that one appearance. A few times, one of the main cast would interact with an extra portraying a crew member—Julie would ask a steward to escort a guest somewhere, or Isaac would ask a waitress to carry a tray of drinks over to someone—but for the most part it seemed like our regulars did all the work on the ship. When Captain Stubing would have pre-cruise preparation meetings, it was always just with the main cast, who were not necessarily the people a real cruise ship captain would be meeting with right before sailing. (Take Gopher—he was only the assistant yeoman purser, and yet he was in all those meetings while the chief yeoman purser was not. Actually, I’m pretty sure the chief purser never made an appearance in the entire ten years the show was on the air. I believe Gopher got a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it promotion to chief purser in later seasons, but he was definitely assistant-purser-with-odd-authority at first.)

In TNG, the same sort of thing would happen. CMO Beverly Crusher claimed to have other doctors working under her, but beyond a Vulcan named Selar who showed up in one episode of the show, we didn’t see them. Missions that seemed suited to one of the science departments of the Enterprise, like xenobiology or astrophysics, would be carried out by senior staff members—also known as the main cast. There were a few more named recurring crew member characters on TNG than on The Love Boat, like Miles O’Brien and Reg Barclay, but for the most part our bridge crew did pretty much everything. And while it makes sense on TNG for the senior staff to interact with each other a great deal, they should also be interacting with their respective teams—and yet we don’t really see that happen. Geordi and Data are more likely to address an engineering problem on their own in a given episode than Geordi and the actual engineering staff, and we don’t really see Worf running his security teams through drills or target practice. On The Love Boat, Doc and Isaac for some reason are often seen checking passengers in at boarding, when that should not be in their job description at all and what we should see is Gopher supervising his staff doing those duties.

Both shows are more plot driven rather than character driven. Our main cast members in both shows are meant to serve as respondents to new situations brought aboard their respective ships, rather than personalities to be interrogated in depth. The main cast is defined enough that the audience can have a favorite character and know how a Picard story differs from a Worf story, or a Gopher story from a Julie story. But all in all the draw and focus of TNG was more “What is the crisis on the planet of the week?” or “What common ground can be found with this new alien species?” or “What commentary on the human condition can be extrapolated from this shipwide invasion?” rather than, say, Beverly’s mental and emotional state as a widow working under the man who ordered her husband to his death or the nuances of Troi and Riker’s no-longer-dating-but-still-sort-of-in-love friendship. Meanwhile, The Love Boat was preoccupied with “What sort of antics will this week’s cast of characters bring on board?”. Doc joked regularly about his multiple ex-wives, but we never got a character study about how Doc seemed to like falling in love more than maintaining a romantic relationship in the long term.

The Love Boat’s regular cast were pretty much the same season to season—Gopher was accident-prone and quick to goof around, Doc maintained his Lothario status, Captain Stubing was quick to both rebuke and advise. I didn’t really watch the post-Julie seasons, so maybe some character developments happened that I missed, but generally the passengers were the ones transformed by their time on the ship, not the crew. TNG characters did have a bit more of an arc than the crew of the Pacific Princess—Data got more in touch with his humanity and Picard relaxed more around his personnel, for instance. But that didn’t apply to all the characters—I’m hard-pressed to think of any sizeable developments in Geordi’s character beyond being promoted to Chief Engineer. Speaking of that promotion, once the show found its footing and everyone had the positions they would come to be known for—Geordi as Chief Engineer rather than the helmsman he was early on, Worf as Chief Tactical Officer post-death of Tasha Yar—nothing really changed for our main characters’ situations. The status quo was strictly enforced despite events unfolding that would have naturally led to transitions. After “Best of Both Worlds,” it would have made sense for Riker to ascend to his own command, but instead he stayed first officer season after season. Worf resigned his commission to fight in the Klingon Civil War, but once that was over, he strolled back onto the bridge without even any extra paperwork.

That aversion to long-term change was in keeping with the episodic nature of both shows. Nowadays, we’re used to the need to keep up with each season’s developments in a television show and watch every episode lest we miss some important revelation. In the case of TNG and The Love Boat, for the most part, you can drop a new viewer into any given episode and they’ll be fine. The stories are largely self-contained, and everything is pretty much resolved at the end of the hour.

This TNG/TLB comparison, however, is not resolved just yet...stay tuned for part 2!