Airdate: 01/06/1988

Directed By: Michael Landon

The New Year’s episode is here. The fourth season wasn’t performing like the series used to in terms of ratings, and the future looked grim. Still, January has always been a strong month for Highway’s ratings; this year, they kicked it off with this.

One thing: this will be the last year for the production crew (the last episode of the series was shot in December this year).

Another thing: it’s the last episode of the series with the word “Love” in the title. It was worth pointing out (the words “Love” and “Song” are the most frequently used titles of the series). The series has come a long way from where it started.

One last thing: there are plenty of “bums” ahead. Like many January episodes before this (Alone and Wally). It seems that Landon couldn’t stay away from them that month.

Complete show available here.

Assignment: Jonathan and Mark are assigned to help a group of runaway orphans find a new family.

During the episode, four brothers who had already lost their father earlier in life, also lose their mother. Now that she’s dead, they are to be separated into different foster homes, as their ages make it difficult to keep them together—for some reason, as if people only want to adopt children of a certain age.

However, before dying, their mother makes the eldest son promise to keep the family together. As a result, he convinces his three younger brothers to run away and live as bums in a park.

Two things about their name: one, they are the Barnett brothers, and Barnett was also the family name of the little girl who died in the Heaven On Earth car accident; suppose they are related.

Secondly, their names are Josh, Jimmy, Jason and John, so they’ll be now known as the Js brothers. They can start a band or something.

Anyway, the older brother now works all around, and the three kids remain alone most of the time.

Jonathan and Mark’s assignment is to keep track of them long enough to find someone willing to adopt them. To handle the assignment, they split up: Mark pretends to be a fellow bum living in the same park as the orphans.

His park. He’s really into his role as bum.

Meanwhile, Jonathan takes a job as an elementary-school teacher at the brothers’ school and befriends a fellow teacher for reasons that are not immediately clear.

Of course, Jonathan never acts without a plan in these adoption episodes (as in A Special Love): he knows exactly what her role is. After getting orphans new parents for over four seasons, Jonathan is cut out for this.

The episode then shifts into a courtroom story—the fifth one in the series and the second this season.

You can’t interrupt like that in a court.

It’s more like a Kangaroo court, as in A Divine Madness in season one.

• Background

As for its background, the episode is set in Los Angeles: it opens with a funeral.

This episode adds to the list of episodes that open with a funeral—An Investment in Caring in season one, Close Encounters of the Heavenly Kind and Keep Smiling and To Bind The Wounds in season two, and Amazing Man earlier this season. Quite sad, ain’t it?

Secondly, it’s the Rosedale, the same cemetery of all those episodes. Landon really liked to use old settings.

The assignment spans a week. It could be longer—but realistically, Jonathan wouldn’t spend more time as teacher.

• Characters

There is a mention to Jonathan and Mark’s past. At the beginning of the episode, Jonathan informs Mark that part of the assignment is related to teaching, and Mark is used to that.

He already worked as school teacher in the season-two finale and A Night To Remember, and as prison teacher earlier this season.

Though he never enjoyed any of those—especially the first time.

Anyway, he also adds something.

People should know he likes that: he revealed in A Night To Remember in season three that coaching was the best kind of assignment. Although he has never been a football coach so far.

His prayers will be answered, eventually: he’ll be one by this season finale.

For this assignment, though, he’ll be a bum—again taking on this role for the second time in the series.

What on Earth is he dressed like this for?

The first time he played the bum, in Wally, he had different clothes.

But there’s just no excuse for him to be dressed like this.

And Mark knows that.

So Jonathan drops a punchline.

Jonathan, no.

For one thing: what the hell he dressed that way for if it’s the “kind of person you are” that matters. At this point, he could have kept his old clothes.

But Jonathan already knows that: this line is the same he dropped in Catch A Falling Star in season one, when he scolded Mark for judging people he didn’t know yet.

Though Jonathan wore his Sunday Suit for that assignment.

Now, Jonathan had changed his attire on that episode. That was probably done in order to impress their future employer, who was a movie actor. But if it’s the “kind of person” that matters, then he shouldn’t have worn that in the first place: he could have walked on set dressed up the same and impress the employer with his punchlines.

He didn’t, though, for he knew that using a new attire was going to win his trust more easily.

Yet, now he’s teaching Mark that being dressed up as a bum is no problem to win the kids’ trust. Even though he should have known from his experience in Catch A Falling Star that it’s not always the case. An angel who doesn’t apply his own moral teachings.

Then Jonathan probably realized this punchline was too idealistic and contradicted his own actions in Catch A Falling Star, so he later gives Mark a tent to help him win the children over.

Which suggests that material things do, in fact, play a role in gaining trust.

And how is he going to justify that.

There’s another problem: the Js brothers consider Mark a bum. And Mark will have to find a way to explain how he got all those things if up until last night he slept on a bench.

But they won’t ask him where those come from either.

If they ask him something, he’ll probably say it was a “Friend“. Like Jonathan used to say in the Pilot.

Though they are more like Leslie and the elderly folks in the Pilot: a man comes into your life with plenty of stuff, and you won’t ask him anything.

• Actors (Highway Actors, Highway Family)

As for the cast, this episode features several familiar faces, including actors from Highway roles as well. In particular, the four orphan brothers are played by three former child actors and one former actor from another Landon series—though not Little House.

The eldest brother is played by Byron Thames, who had a recurring role in Father Murphy, the TV series Landon produced during the final years of Little House. If you don’t remember it, don’t worry: it was unsuccessful in ratings, and was cancelled before concluding its second season.

Curiously, that series has a premise similar to this episode: it follows the titular character pretending to be a priest as he helps a group of runaway orphans find new homes. And Thames played one of those orphans.

They recycled that premise for this episode.

At some point in this episode, Mark has to pretend to be their father.

He’s probably imitating Merlin Olsen from that series.

Anyway, Thames later quit acting and moved into voice work and music scoring instead.

The three younger Js brothers of the are all played by former child actors.

The second eldest is Christian Guzek, in his first role of his career; he’d later play a recurring character in the sitcom Full House, then work on and off in the industry in some capacity, to eventually leave that and work in finance instead. The third brother is played by Coleby Lombardo, in his second role of his career: he retired from acting in 1991 and has become a drug and alcohol abuse counselor, something Landon would probably like (given his obsessions with drugs).

Lastly, the youngest brother is not entirely new to the series: he’s played by Michael Faustino, in the first role of his career. More notably, as his surname suggests, he is the younger brother of David Faustino, who appeared in Highway in Plane Death in season one, playing the son of Mark’s missing friend—later revealed to have been killed by drug dealers in town.

Do you remember that?

So, that’s the fourth case of Highway Family and siblings, following the Jacoby brothers in season one (Catch A Falling Star, then Dust Child and The Brightest Star) and the Ratcliff brothers (I Was A Middle Aged Werewolf and Amazing Man earlier this season); now the Faustinos join the group. There is also the Wallach family, but in that case parents and daughter appeared in the same episode, which is slightly different from siblings appearing separately across different episodes.

Curiously, this episode of Highway also marked the first role in Michael Faustino’s career. It’s as though they needed four actors to play the brothers, and David Faustino informed them that his brother wanted to become an actor and joined in. That is not unusual for Landon’s productions: on Little House, for instance, the actors playing Willie and Laura are siblings, as well as a bunch of others.

And he’s not through yet: Faustino would eventually work again with Landon in 1989 for the TV movie Where The Pigeons Go To Die, the first project Landon made when French died and Highway concluded, and Faustino played a supporting character.

In any case, beyond the Highway Family, there is also another old-timer from this series, and Little House before it. The episode features Richard Bull as the judge presiding over the hearing.

He had a long history of collaboration with Landon beginning with Bonanza, where he guest-appeared in two episodes (one in 1969 and another in 1972), and continuing with Little House for nine years as Nels Oleson, the kind-hearted mercantile storekeeper.

On that series, Bull appeared throughout all nine seasons: he was credited as a featured recurring character from seasons one to eight, and then became a protagonist in season nine.

After that series, he also made an appearance along the Highway To Heaven in the season one finale, playing the friendly country doctor who diagnoses Lizzy with her disease.

Do you remember that too?

And now he’s back for a second guest role.

And Landon must have appreciated him, as their collaboration continued further: in 1989, like Faustino, he too played a supporting character in the movie Where The Pigeons Go To Die—the last completed project of Landon’s career—as a doctor once more, like his first role in Highway.

Their professional relationship ended there, as Landon passed away two years after making that movie, and Bull, continued acting for several more years, including stage work, before retiring in the early 2000s. He died in 2014 from lung disease, 26 years after this episode.

So, Bull is one of a small group of Little House actors in Highway (those actors who appeared at least once in both series) who also, eventually became Highway Actors (those who appeared in more than one episode in this series): the rest of them are John McLiam, Lew Ayers (the most recurring Highway Actor), David Kaufman and Eddie Quillan, although Kaufman has yet to make his second appearance in Highway.

• Production and Setting

As for the production itself, this episode was filmed during the first week of November 1987, over the course of one week, immediately after the Cop narcs show. According to the production schedule, the first scenes they shot on the fist day were those of Mark sleeping on a bench, and then the one he accepts being the Barnett’s dad.

The script was written in July by Vince Gutierrez, marking his third contribution to the series. His previous episode had not fully worked out in ratings (it was the least watched episode of the series by the time of its airing, though he was later surpassed multiple times by this season’s).

One curious thing: according to the original script, the ending was originally meant to be longer: after the trial and the teacher’s emotional decision to take the brothers in, a flashback sequence was supposed to play out, with the moment of the actual mother’s promise.

Basically, the flashback showed the dying mother (who, doesn’t appear in the final episode) calling her eldest son to her room. After a brief moment of joking to ease the tension surrounding her impending death, she confesses that she knows her sons will be placed in separate foster homes, so she asks him to promise that he will do his best and do whatever it takes to keep them together. The son agrees, they embrace, and the episode concluded there. For some reason, however, this flashback was omitted from the final episode, which instead ends with the boys being happy about their adoption and embracing their new mother.

Perhaps this was done because the production would have needed to cast an actress to play the brothers’ mother just for that scene, and chose to avoid the additional time and effort.

As for the setting, it was produced in Los Angeles: the opening funeral was shot at Rosedale Cemetery, like in every other episode opening the same way. Again, Landon liked to recycle old sets.

Glossary:

Blooper: the episode has one blooper during the scene where the children are waiting for Josh to arrive at school, but he’s late, and a principal offers to take them home. This entire part is wrong: partly because the kids could have waited outside the school, or could have told the principal to drop them off to a park or Josh’s workplace instead of making up a fake address and foolishly blow their cover. But the real blooper is elsewhere: when the car stops near the house the boys are pretending is theirs, a kid on a bicycle can be seen staring directly at them through the driver’s window.

The blooper becomes even more noticeable when, as the car drives away, the child is suddenly gone.

This is reminiscent of the man with sunglasses from Catch A Falling Star who spied on Jonathan and Mark through their window.

Bums: one of the BBD, the three Landon’s obsessions.

You?

And Mark effectively has to become one.

Cute: one cute drop is at the beginning, when Mark learns he’ll have to be a bum.

Another Cute is dropped when Jonathan scolds him for sleeping instead of working.

Punchline: in this episode, Jonathan drops many off-beat punchlines. There’s one to point out, though: when the fellow teacher is informed that the orphans are being taken away, she complains that the system doesn’t consider people.

That’s similar to what Mr. Edwards said in the episode The Wild Boy from Little House season nine, which was coincidentally written by Gutierrez like this episode.

Friendly Jonathan: there’s one instance when he wakes Mark up from his sleep.

And teases him.

Try and take his job, then.

As though men weren’t allowed to sleep anymore.

Then, he uses the power to disappear from Mark. While Mark was still talking to him.

That’s not polite. And makes him go mad.

No idea whether it was improvised or not.

Though Mark should be used to this: Jonathan did the same thing (quietly waking off while his friend is still talking to him) in The Banker And The Bum and Cindy, to name some.

It’s like a quiet quitting on his friend. That’s not cute.

Sunday Suits: Jonathan wears his own gray suit as part of the job.

Though Mark won’t. He’ll play the bum.

The Stuff: the powers are only used twice, when Jonathan gifts Mark a tent and leaves him talking to himself at the park.

A “Friend” gave him those. You wouldn’t want to know anything more.

The Job: it’s a double job this time. Jonathan works as a teacher, the fourth time in the series and the second this season.

While Mark is a bum, the second time.

So, it seems like Bums is a real job in the series.

Ratings: 29 – 30 million audience. 21st Weekly TV program, 3rd TV genre show.

The episode originally aired in January 1988 as the first of the new year, and followed after a two-week break from the Christmas Holidays. The week before this, they aired a rerun of the Ghost episode in season three, which is weird: in the second and third seasons’ Christmas Holiday break they aired a rerun of a Christmas Special (actually, the season one’s special both times) but this year they went for a totally random episode unrelated to the festivity. Despite having a Christmas Special which has never had a rerun before (the season three Christmas special).

Anyway, unlike many of its predecessors from the season, it was quite popular. In fact, this episode became the most-watched show of the season up to this point, and remained so for the rest of it. This was a strong result, especially since most episodes so far—excluding the season’s first episode—had not performed particularly well. At the same time, though, it’s important to point out that these ratings were comparable to many episodes from Seasons one and three, and if it had aired during Season two, it likely would have been among the lower-rated episodes of that season.

This indicates the series may have been losing momentum, and that as it progresses, it becomes less likely to recover its earlier popularity—which is not something particularly encouraging for its future, especially in case of potential new seasons. However, there is still a possibility that this season will stabilize without further decline, and that later episodes could perform better. It also seems to confirm that January is the show’s strongest month in terms of ratings. That was already the case in all the other seasons (January 1985 from One Winged Angels in season one, then 1986 from Alone in season two and 1987 from All That Glitters in season three).

However, October is usually the second most popular time of year for the series after January, and season four’s October 1987 recorded the least-watched episodes ever for Highway (from the Fight episode to the Halloween Special), so there was no way to be certain it could hold in this case. At last, it did.

This episode also marked the largest improvement between two consecutive episodes of the season (in this case, from The Claus) even though they were not weekly consecutive episodes, as this was broadcast a couple of weeks after that one. Usually, one skipped week damages the ratings, but in this case, due to the Christmas Holiday, it was probably for the best.