Three’s Company – Season Six
Picture: C+
Sound: C+ Extras: C Episodes: B-
Three’s Company – Season Six was the
end of the creative line for the show.
This 1981 – 82 Season had just enough going for it that habitual
watchers kept it a hit for a few more seasons, but everything the show could do
had been done. Don Knotts remained as
landlord Furley and Pricilla Barnes was the permanent blonde roommate. It is testament to the talents of the cast
and creators that they could still make it look fresh enough. The episodes in this set are as follows:
1)
Jack Bares It All (two parts)
2)
Terri Makes Her Move
3)
Professor Jack (with Frank Aletter)
4)
Some Of That Jazz (with Michael Bell)
5)
Lies My Roommate Told Me (with
Teresa Ganzel)
6)
Two Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (with
Murray Matheson & Jeffrey Tambor)
7)
Eyewitness Blues (with Mystic Pizza
director Donald Petrie)
8)
Boy Meets Dummy
9)
Dates Of Wrath
10) Macho Man
11) Strangers In The Night
12) The Match Breakers (with
Ruta Lee)
13) Oh, Nun
14) Maid To Order
15) Hearts & Flowers
16) Urban Plowboy (with
Sue Ane Langdon)
17) A Friend In Need
18) Jack’s 10
19) Doctor In The House
20) Critic’s Choice
21) Paradise Lost
22) And Now, Here’s Jack
23) Janet Wigs Out
24) Up In The Air
25) Mate For Each Other
Now there was also a two-part Best Of show hosted
by no less than Lucille Ball, who saw the show as a sort of return of the kind
of comedy she pioneered before All In The Family became the successor to
the laughs-only comedy she preferred. It
is here in its hour-long network broadcast form as a supplement. Needless to say the sexuality of the show,
especially in its early seasons, would not have been possible in her time and
without All In The Family, its spin-offs, imitators and like shows. Unfortunately, the show became too safe at
this point, so Lucy’s arrival was not quite the grand endorsement it would have
been a few years earlier. John Ritter
returned the favor by appearing in the second episode of Lucy’s failed return
comedy series Loving Lucy, by showing up in the second show of the very
short-lived show. Unfortunately, sitcoms
were about to die when another non-fan of All In The Family found
himself with his biggest network hit ever when The Cosby Show
arrived. Loving Lucy was
greenlighted because of Cosby’s show, but to no avail. Now, sitcoms are a total disaster for the
most part.
The 1.33 X 1 full frame image is once again from the NTSC
analog videotape the show was shot on and the DVD’s MPEG-2 decoding shows its
limits as much as all the other shows from this period of time would. The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono is also good
enough, with all the jokes still clear enough, though fidelity is slightly
improved from earlier seasons. Extras
include commentary tracks again, plus the Lucille Ball compilation like the
kind series always made before hundreds of cable channels and DVD and a Laughs
Around The World segment that covers the show in other countries. This includes an abbreviated comparison of an
original show with one from Poland, where they have started reshooting original
scripts in 1999 into a hit over there.
The comparison is amusing.
- Nicholas Sheffo
