It is a three-day weekend and Chicago psychologist Dr. Bob Hartley PhD (Bob Newhart) is looking to take advantage and get out of town with his wife Emily (Suzanne Pleshette). But she has a fear of flying. The first episode ever aired of this series depicted her fear of flying at its most erratic point. In the series her fear of flying was a running gag. Of course that limits where a couple from Chicago can go on a three-day weekend.
Bob asks her to randomly pick a spot on a map that is within reach of where their car can travel to and back from. This idea an astoundingly bad idea. Bob is supposed to be the last kind of guy to have an idea that absurd. But a lot of people have had the same idea and done what they do here in order just to be spontaneous. Emily bites and the results are a special kind of disastrous.
The place they get is a ski resort inn so decrepit it is on the brink of collapse. The manager (Allen Garfield) is kind of skeevy and entirely unprepared to deliver the guest experience advertised. They also have to share their bathroom with the couple across the hall. The Millers (Chuck McCann and Joyce Van patten) are loud and boorish but they seem like nice people...At first. The Hartley's are polite but they wanted to get away from people for a bit, kick back and focus on each other.
What they staged is like a slasher movie except instead of running for their lives the couple just wants to avoid awkwardness and doing things they don't like with people they don't know at a destination they somehow expected more from. Things get even worse as the first night progresses and pretty soon Bob and Emily are hiding out in their room. How long will they stick it out? Can they get away without being seen? Can it get worse?
Notes:
If you're a fan of this comedian and his humour you can see one parallel with his later work on the series Newhart (1982-90). The setting here is an inn outside the city and the set looks like an early version of what the Newhart/Stratford Inn set would look like. But we don't see Bob pivot to the whole Green Acres-in-a-Blue State direction he would be able circle back to on the later series.
On an episode of Newhart, the later series, Bob as Dick Louden and his wife Joanna have the same idea of picking a vacation spot at random but of course they had to do something different with it.
Bob asks her to randomly pick a spot on a map that is within reach of where their car can travel to and back from. This idea an astoundingly bad idea. Bob is supposed to be the last kind of guy to have an idea that absurd. But a lot of people have had the same idea and done what they do here in order just to be spontaneous. Emily bites and the results are a special kind of disastrous.
The place they get is a ski resort inn so decrepit it is on the brink of collapse. The manager (Allen Garfield) is kind of skeevy and entirely unprepared to deliver the guest experience advertised. They also have to share their bathroom with the couple across the hall. The Millers (Chuck McCann and Joyce Van patten) are loud and boorish but they seem like nice people...At first. The Hartley's are polite but they wanted to get away from people for a bit, kick back and focus on each other.
What they staged is like a slasher movie except instead of running for their lives the couple just wants to avoid awkwardness and doing things they don't like with people they don't know at a destination they somehow expected more from. Things get even worse as the first night progresses and pretty soon Bob and Emily are hiding out in their room. How long will they stick it out? Can they get away without being seen? Can it get worse?
Notes:
If you're a fan of this comedian and his humour you can see one parallel with his later work on the series Newhart (1982-90). The setting here is an inn outside the city and the set looks like an early version of what the Newhart/Stratford Inn set would look like. But we don't see Bob pivot to the whole Green Acres-in-a-Blue State direction he would be able circle back to on the later series.
On an episode of Newhart, the later series, Bob as Dick Louden and his wife Joanna have the same idea of picking a vacation spot at random but of course they had to do something different with it.
