With Billie Jo returning to the Shady Rest with a new beau in tow, an overly enthusiastic Bobbie Jo springs into action to deliver a lesson in "How to Arrange a Marriage" that exasperates everyone awaiting Billie Jo's arrival--and unnerves Bobbie Jo's boyfriend Orrin when Billie Jo and Jerry Roberts (Greg Mullavey) finally do show up.
Charles Stewart and Dick Conway phoned in their lackluster script to Sam Drucker's general store, with director Elliot Lewis taking the message with indifference to the uninvolving story, thus abandoning the cast to go through their motions with subdued, even leaden performances save for Lori Saunders, whose artificial animation only heightens this episode's muted yet palpable awkwardness and quiet desperation.
Mullavey, who was married to Meredith MacRae at the time, is little more than a prop in an episode that needs propping up; he and MacRae strike no sparks in a relationship contrived purely as catalyst, with a pair of twists at the close that try to goose the narrative but wind up canceling each other out in an exercise of ultimate futility. What begins with Billie Jo's off-screen admission to Bobbie Jo that she might be in love fizzles fast. This one is strictly a marriage of convenience to keep a faltering series, crippled by the death of star Bea Benaderet in 1968, stumbling along on sheer inertia.
Filling the time in this skeletal premise are a brief musical number by Linda Kaye Henning and Mike Minor (Irving Berlin's "(Just One Way to Say) I Love You") and a longer spotlight on MacRae (Jimmy Dorsey and Paul Medeira's "I'm Glad There Is You (In This World of Ordinary People)"). But don't worry about a wedding gift. This marriage won't last long.
Charles Stewart and Dick Conway phoned in their lackluster script to Sam Drucker's general store, with director Elliot Lewis taking the message with indifference to the uninvolving story, thus abandoning the cast to go through their motions with subdued, even leaden performances save for Lori Saunders, whose artificial animation only heightens this episode's muted yet palpable awkwardness and quiet desperation.
Mullavey, who was married to Meredith MacRae at the time, is little more than a prop in an episode that needs propping up; he and MacRae strike no sparks in a relationship contrived purely as catalyst, with a pair of twists at the close that try to goose the narrative but wind up canceling each other out in an exercise of ultimate futility. What begins with Billie Jo's off-screen admission to Bobbie Jo that she might be in love fizzles fast. This one is strictly a marriage of convenience to keep a faltering series, crippled by the death of star Bea Benaderet in 1968, stumbling along on sheer inertia.
Filling the time in this skeletal premise are a brief musical number by Linda Kaye Henning and Mike Minor (Irving Berlin's "(Just One Way to Say) I Love You") and a longer spotlight on MacRae (Jimmy Dorsey and Paul Medeira's "I'm Glad There Is You (In This World of Ordinary People)"). But don't worry about a wedding gift. This marriage won't last long.