Airdate: 03/21/1989

Directed By: Michael Landon

The fifth season continues after a long hiatus. It’s been more than three months since they decided to interrupt the airing of the new episodes for the entire winter, resuming in March, just as the season is drawing to a conclusion. But that’s the way it is with this peculiar season.

Maybe they thought the ratings would be better this time. Or perhaps they were already considering dropping the series. Either way, they decided to go for a particularly touchy episode. It’s probably one of the most controversial episodes of the series, at least from a religious perspective.

Overview:

• Assignment
• Background
• Characters
• Production and Setting

Glossary:

• Blooper
• Punchline
• Highway Actors
• Sunday Suit
• The Job
• Ratings

Complete show available here.

Assignment: Jonathan and Mark are assigned to help the head of a congregation fight back against the church council.

It’s a really difficult episode. Basically, Jonathan and Mark work as teachers at an inclusive, multicultural nursery school attended by children from all religious backgrounds and nationalities.

The school is headed by Tobias, who is also the pastor of the neighborhood congregation. Everything seems fine until the church council one day suddenly realizes that the school is funded by the church.

So two demands are put forward: they no longer want non-Christian teachers working at the school, and Christianity must be taught there as well.

This leads to most of the teachers walking out, either because they are unwilling to give up their own beliefs or as an act of solidarity with those who refuse to do so. And Mark wants to do the same.

But that’s the assignment.

By now, they should be aware of the consequences of turning against an order.

Even the school’s bell defects, as it stops working.

Then something doesn’t work so fine.

The only ones who remain are Jonathan and Mark, who must help Tobias find a way to lead the way and prove the council wrong.

• Background

As for the background, the rest of the assignment seemingly takes place over the course of a week, as usual.

But there’s more to it: apparently, this episode is one of the few in the series to be based on a real incident.

In May 1988, around four months before this episode was produced, a Christian nursery school in Sherman Oaks, led by Reverend John Powells, declared that Christianity would be taught at the school from that point onward, and that any staff member who was not Christian was reportedly asked to resign within a year (the full story is here).

Eventually, all fourteen staff members, including the Christian ones, walked away in protest, accusing the council of bigotry. And that same year, they wound up opening a new school in Van Nuys using an old summer camp that still exists and operates today. All but three families moved their children there, leaving the Presbyterian school with fewer than ten enrolled students by the summer, although it eventually managed to attract enough children to continue operating. Both schools are still active, with the Presbyterian school having been converted into a fully Christian one.

As described in an article on the L.A. Times discussing the production of this show, Landon was reportedly struck by the news and decided to write a Highway episode about it all.

In a way, the story may have struck home: as he revealed on multiple occasions, including that same interview, growing up was hard due to his parents belonging to different religions and being intolerant of one another, particularly his mother, who resented him when Landon decided to convert to Judaism.

However, as Landon emphasized, his intention was to show a way of resisting the decree. As he explained in the interview, he did not want simply to portray the incident; he wanted to write a story in which the characters do what is right. In this case, using the pastor’s influence to overturn the decision.

Which all connects to the way Landon felt about the series: not a place where everything is either wrong or right, but where everybody should learn something along the way, Jonathan and Mark included.

Of course, this makes the episode even more potentially controversial, much like A Child of God in the first season, which concluded with a reverend preaching that Christianity does not have all the answers and calling out fundamentalists as bigots. The same approach is evident here, particularly when the children accuse the pastor’s religion of overlooking the values of respect and point out the inherent contradictions in a decree that promotes discrimination within a religion promoting other values.

It was perhaps inevitable that the episode would provoke a reaction. The article revealed that, when word got out that Landon was going to turn the story into a Highway episode, more than twenty people wrote letters asking the production to shut it down, fearing that the episode would be religiously inaccurate. However, as Landon pointed out, Highway and this episode do not have the purpose to discriminate against Christianity, nor was he trying to be conceited or preachy about the meaning of religion. Rather, his point was that religion should not be a source of disagreement and conflict, and that people can respect one another without judging each other on the basis of their beliefs. This is similar to what A Child of God was ultimately about: people learning to value and appreciate one another even more because of their differences.

So, what it all boils down to is that it’s the fourth episode in the series to be based on a true story. Now that the series is drawing to a conclusion, it may be useful to consider that most of its episodes are fictional or based on existing material, particularly books or previous television shows. There are, however, some exceptions, with certain episodes based on true stories or real-life incidents.

Usually, when an episode is not entirely fictional, it can take one of two different approaches. In some cases, the episode is merely grounded in a real setting or historical context while telling a fictional story. (as in The Torch, referencing the Order supremacy movement but making up the rest about a Jewish activist losing his son in a terrorist attack). In other cases, the episode is entirely, or almost entirely, based on a true story.

This episode belongs to the second category. Other examples include A Match Made in Heaven, which told the real story behind the marriage of James and Theresa Troesh, who also wrote the episode, and A Song for Jason, which was set at an actual summer camp for children with cancer and told the story of a group of children the writer met while researching the show.

• Characters

There’s something important about the characters. At the beginning of the episode, Jonathan and Mark are driving to their next assignment when Mark unexpectedly begins praising young people.

And Jonathan is astounded, too. Of course, after spending three episodes at a summer camp, Mark has probably stopped criticizing kids.

It also turns out that he was named after Mark Twain, which is very random.

But most importantly, he does the race face.

That’s the third time in the series that two characters engage in a weirdly comical and unsettlingly humorous animal-imitation face-off. And it’s the first time involving Mark—or French, more accurately. He’s certainly too into this role. Actually, in an interview from 1978 (basically ten years before this episode was made) for ABC, he revealed that he liked to spend time making animal faces at himself in the mirror. He also remarked that it should give people an idea of how lonely he was. That interview was taped a few months before his second divorce, for that matter, although people thought it was merely a joke and just laughed it off. That’s how they treat you when you try to be serious.

Anyway, he certainly worked on his craft in those ten years, and that’s the result. Even the kid knows how to be scary. This episode probably had to air on Halloween.

• Production and Setting

As for the production, this episode was produced in late September, immediately after the special Vietnam episode that aired before it. Although there was yet another episode produced before that one, it would air later on.

Apparently, the school used in the episode is James Middle School, while the church is a real Christian church near the location where the real story took place.

While the school was farther away.

Here’s one curious thing: as revealed in the article about this episode, during the final punchline showdown, in which Tobias defies the decision, the congregation reportedly stood up and cheered for both the actor and the speech once the scene was over.

Glossary:

Blooper: a background one. During the introduction at the end of Jonathan and Mark’s day, a teacher is is sitting on the armchair drinking a soda while Jonathan is waiting for his line on the wall.

But then, when his line actually comes, he’s theatrically walking in the room.

And dropping punchlines.

Just Landon who wanted to steal the thunder.

Punchline: as revealed by Landon in the interview, the episode doesn’t want to be lecturing, but just showing a different way to handle things. With no contempt. But even Jonathan has his share of punchlines. He had to state his opinion.

No way he can step behind the reverend.

Highway Actors: as for the actors, there’s an old connection: the Reverend’s wife (not another reverend, unlike in the real story, but partially inspired by Pamela Powells) is played by Robin Riker, who already appeared in Highway over three years earlier in A Song For Jason in season two, as the overtly protective mother of Curtis (who was based on a real kid).

So, two appearances on the series in two rare episodes based on a true story—that’s no coincidence.

Sunday Suit: during the showdown at the church, Jonathan and Mark both have their gray Sunday suits on.

The Job: they work as teachers. It’s one of the most frequent jobs they have in the series, though it’s the first time with young children. So they had to fake their references to get it.

One curious thing: they both liked this job.

In other instances, Mark used to say that he doesn’t like kids. But in this episode, he changes his mind quite a few times.

Ratings: 21 million audience. 40th tie weekly TV program.

It aired in late March 1989, the first episode of the new year, and more than three months after the preceding one. And on a Tuesday, the only show of the series that day. That’s because, when NBC scheduled its new series in 1988, it decided to renew Highway for one last season but only ordered it as a “replacement.” This meant that it wouldn’t air regularly every Wednesday at 8:00, as it had during all the previous seasons. Instead, it would be discontinued and brought back occasionally in random time slots when a regular series had to skip an episode for any reason.

As a result, the first episode aired in October to fill in for the Baseball World Series, the second aired in December, and now came the third. In fact, in an interview from fall 1988, Landon explained that NBC planned to air the season in the spring, when the other TV series were drawing to an end, just as Highway had done in previous seasons. This episode did indeed air in March, but it was the only one to do so. Afterward, the network pulled the rest of the season off the air until June, when it was quietly burned off with no promotion.

So, considering that this episode actually aired in early spring, it’s unclear whether the network had intended to begin airing the rest of Season Five from this point onward but then scrapped the plan for some reason, or whether this was always meant to be an isolated exception, with no intention of following it up with new episodes until the summer at the earliest.

That could very well have been the case. The 1988 TV season began two months later than usual because of a writers’ strike that began in the spring and lasted until late summer, delaying the start of production for TV series and programs that were originally scheduled to begin airing in September until at least the winter. So maybe the network had actually planned to schedule this fifth season for the spring, but the TV season itself had started two months late, meaning it would also conclude two months later. By the time this episode aired, many TV programs and seasons had yet to conclude, and Highway could only begin airing regularly in the summer, when those programs were finished.

Either way, this episode aired in March, three months after production had concluded—the series finale had been shot before Christmas—which makes it kind of sad. The production team was essentially watching this episode air when they had already moved on.

In terms of ratings, though, it wasn’t that bad. In fact, it performed better than some episodes from Season Four. Considering that the fourth season had aired consecutively, that TV series generally benefited from airing episodes in regular succession, and that this episode received little to no promotion beyond the controversy surrounding its subject matter, its ratings were surprisingly, even unexpectedly, strong.

Again, they weren’t high compared with any episode from the first three seasons, or with the weekly programs airing at the time, including those that aired during the same week. But within the context of this series, it worked out just fine. When the Halloween special in Season Four managed ratings comparable to those of a regular-season episode, things could certainly have been much worse.

And yet, the season is going on hiatus again.

Maybe somebody ought to have had a little more faith in this series.