Some of the episodes of "Walton's Mountain" are very watchable -- a good smattering of them up to but not including 1976, when Grandma (Ellen Corby) and Grandpa (Will Geer) were having less and less to do with the show. The sibjects covered got more and more teenage and trivial and it turned into an ordinary period soap. Soon after, the two oldies (and the Baldwin sisters), who had seen so much of life, were elbowed aside entirely and that was virtually the end of character-driven drama in the series. Like Laura Ingalls Wilder who originated "Little House on the Prairie", Earl Hamner's "Spencer's Mountain" was boring as a feature film. Other series writers outdid him in the tv series, thank goodness -- though one or other of the Waltons (and the Wilders) was invariably the hero of the hour. One glaring oversight was seen in "The Wedding" -- Mary Ellen Walton's near the end of 1976. Only two years before when a young fella not much older had tried to "spark" her she was taken under the family's wing as "a child". Now at 18 she is married off to a 50-year-old without a single reservation expressed.
Review of The Waltons
