The Crazies

After chickening out of being honest in a Drama exercise, Doris and Montgomery make a pack to completely tell the truth for the rest of the day. This leads to a number of conflicts between the students and teachers. Lydia and Sherwood end up switching classes and Sherwood needs Leroy to teach her to dance so she can perform in the show. 

However, after Shorofsky is mugged and ends up in hospital the future of the show is threatened. 

I really love this episode and it's probably my favourite 1st season episode. It is just such a simple idea and how things spiral out of control is really laugh out loud hilarious.

Debbie, Carol and Albert seem particularly to be having fun with the script. Also every character seems to be involved apart from Coco who really just seems to be a supporting character.

Doris is great and I love the Leroy teaching Sherwood to dance storyline. It was a nice reversal of the teacher student scenario. Also Shorofsky being mugged added an emotional element to the show.

Over here in the U.K. this episode was aired as the last episode in this series and for years I thought it was actually the season finale. It made sense because Shorofsky mentions this happens near the end of each year and Crandall mentions that some of the seniors won't get into college without their final marks for the show and the throwing of magic dust into the air at the end made it feel more of a finale.  Although When we actually see the performances there are only the regulars and dancers taking part so where are all the seniors who are supposed to be graduating?

I discovered later that this was originally planned as the final episode and the cast & crew thought they were going on hiatus until NBC ordered 3 more episodes. 

I don't know why the BBC decided to screen the episodes differently but they moved this and “Come One Come All” to the end. However it does seem to work better. They possibly moved "A Special Place" up in the running order because they wanted "Starmaker" to be released as a single and they didn't want it to be released until the episode had been shown. 

A couple of nit picks, Doris goes onto Sherwood's class, presumably for English and tells her what Lydia says about her proposed tribal dance, but then is back in English later that day when Lydia is covering the class. Two lessons of English in one day  for Doris seems very unfair. Maybe she was worse than Leroy in English and needed the extra lessons to catch up!

Also Lydia and Sherwood are swapping the classes they have in the same period. However, when the bell rings for the end of the English class, Sherwood is still teaching the dance class.

Then All the characters in the drama class in the opening scenes are wearing different clothes in the scenes that supposedly take place over the rest of the day. We do see Doris change for dance class but surely after that class she doesn't put on different clothes to the ones she was wearing before the class.

I'm not sure why anyone would phone Lydia and especially Bruno at home when Shorofsky was attacked. I wouldn't have thought they would be listed as next of kin or anything but the scene in the hospital is quite sweet.

Also, Mrs Berg reading the letter is very sweet too and Shorofsky very funny when he says get the diabetics out of the room.

"I was only trying to help" is also a fantastic song and was the first song to really show case Valerie's vocals and is one of my favourites.

"Carnival" is okay but not really one of my favourite songs. Still it's a nice ending to the episode.

Original  air date in U.S.A.  18th March 1982

Original  air date in U.K. 29th Sept 1982,  BBC repeat 18th  August 1986,  The Children's Channel  Autumn 1992, Now 80s 05th & 09th December 2021 

Original air date  in France  29th May 1982

Original Air date in Australia (Melbourne)  06th June 1982

Original air date in Italy 12th March 1983

Original air date in The Netherlands 19th March 1983    

Original air date in Spain 1st May 1983   

Original  air date in West Germany 06th March 1985

Original air date in Belgium 24th September 1987