Guilty Pleasure N° 4: The Love Boat

One of my most treasured childhood memories were Sunday afternoons in 1985: Sharing with my parents, time doing nothing, playing with my friffri friends park and spending hours watching chilean national TV (no cable channels at the time!). Despite my idealized vision of sundays, network's executives had little faith at this slot and usually scheduled almost 100% of reruns of late 70's-early 80's shows  to cut expenses:

Result?:
TV serials like "The Love Boat", "Magnum, P.I", "Dukes of Hazzard", "That's Amazing", "Ripley's Believe It or Not" and "Hart to Hart" were aired back-to-back on these days and kept me . I guess that any of these serials c
The Love Boat was an Aaron Spelling's production that ran on ABC for 9 seasons (1977-86). Week by week, we followed the lives, romances and struggles from the crew and selected passengers of a cruise ship called "Pacific Princess". We had the captain (Gavin MacLeod), the doctor (Bernie Kopell), the bartender (Ted Lange), "Gopher" (Fred Grandy), the lovely cruise director (Lauren Tewes), the unpleasant "Vicki" (Jill Whelan) and a troop of guest actors. It was a big winner in the ratings at the US (as well as Chile), peaking at #5 during the 1980-81 season. The "formula" was very basic and built around 3 parallel stories with distinctive patterns (comedy, romance and drama)

Why is it a truly GP?

1. Variety: The constantly changing cast gave variety to the series and sometimes generated bizarre moments (I mean .. what other chances did you have to see Bobby Short, Gloria Vanderbilt and robert Vaughn sharing screen time?)
2. Indulgence: We all love happy endings but ... always?!
3. Typecasting: Isaac pointing at the camera and laughing ... classic!
4. The generic opening credits sequence with the catchy theme song.