"Separate Tables"

"Separate Tables"
May 13, 1980
C+

In the closing episode of Season Five, the first of two collaborations by Deborah Raznick and Ria Nepus, Shirley makes Laverne confront her fear about spending time alone, by booking them separate tables at a Chinese restaurant.  Note that Laverne seems to genuinely want to go to the movies with Lenny and Squiggy, not just out of loneliness, a change from the first season or two.  And when it becomes clear that Laverne's emergency phone call interrupted Fredna having sex, we get this dialogue.
LAVERNE: Pop, were you fooling around?
FRANK: No, I was serious!

Frank Alesia, who had already written for the show, here directs his first of three episodes.  Rose Michtom understandably makes her last appearance as Mrs. Kolcheck.  Needless to say, I wasn't any more excited to see Julius LaRosa today than I was almost forty years ago.  But it was trippy to see Pat Morita during hiatus from playing Arnold on Happy Days (he was gone for a couple seasons), here as Mr. Wong, even making a joke about his mother pretending to be Chinese after Pearl Harbor!  (I took this as lampshading the fact that Morita had a discussion with Garry Marshall about what specific ethnicity Arnold was, and they decided on a Chinese mother and a Japanese father.)

In its fifth season, Laverne & Shirley tumbled out of the Top 30, thanks I'm sure in no small part to ABC shuffling it around the schedule.  (Its occasional upstairs neighbor Three's Company hung on to #2, while lead-in Happy Days was a respectable although not hot #17.  Even Mork & Mindy, which arguably was more shat upon by ABC than L & S was, did make #27.)  I think Season Five ranges from C to B+, and it still averages out to a B-, so the series had by no means jumped the shark yet, although the whole "army" thing was a definite misstep. 

"Testing, Testing" shows that the cast was still able to bring it, to collaborate in a fresh and yet comfortable way, and I only wish that there were episodes like that.  There was also still some good old drama and angst, like in the Ted Danson episode, and some sweet moments, usually from Laverne & Shirley, Laverne & Lenny, or Laverne & Frank.  I wish more had been done with Edna after she married Frank, although I like how proud Laverne is to call her "Mother," without forgetting the late Mrs. DeFazio.  Five years into this, I'm still not sure that the producers knew what to do with Carmine, and again this is no reflection on Mekka.  But, yes, Lenny & Squiggy continue to be an always welcome presence, to me if not to their long-suffering downstairs neighbors.

As for Season Six, well, we'll get to that tomorrow....