Pubdate: Thu, 14 Apr 2016
Source: Sacramento News & Review (CA)
Copyright: 2016 Chico Community Publishing, Inc.
Contact:  http://newsreview.com/sacto/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/540
Author: Tokie Bowles

NETFLIX AND CHILL WITH MEMORABLE MARIJUANA-THEMED TV EPISODES OF YORE

"No, Aunt Bea and Floyd the Barber don't trade dabs while Opie and 
Andy are off at the ol' fishing hole."

With the possible exception of pizza, there is no greater complement 
to marijuana than television. After all, it's called couch lock for a 
reason. And the love flows both ways, as the medicine has become a 
staple of contemporary television, inextricably linked to shows like 
Weeds, Broad City, The League, Parenthood and most adult-oriented 
animated fare. Marijuana-related storylines have also fueled 
memorable episodes of modern classics like The Office ('Drug 
Testing'; Season 2, Episode 20, available on Netflix), Freaks and 
Geeks ('Chokin"and Tokin,' S1, E13, Netflix) and Curb Your Enthusiasm 
('Carpool Lane,' S4, E6, HBO Go), among others.

But pot plots have been a staple of "very special episode" family 
pap, quasi-topical cop shows and comparatively edgy network comedies 
since the very dawn of television. In honor of this hoary plot 
device, we put together a streaming playlist of weed-related 
television episodes from the pre-legalization 20th century. This 
4/20, you can Netflix and chill with the greats of TV past.

The Andy Griffith Show, "Quiet Sam" (S1, E29, Netflix)

Seemingly the earliest reference to cannabis in a streaming-available 
show comes in this 1961 episode of the apple pie series about a 
small-town sheriff (Griffith) and his spasmodic deputy Barney Fife 
(Don Knotts). No, Aunt Bea and Floyd the Barber don't trade dabs 
while Opie and Andy are off at the ol' fishing hole. Instead, the 
plot revolves around Barney harassing a quiet, shifty-eyed loner for 
no good reason (ah, police abuse of powers ... always good for a 
wholesome chuckle), suspecting the guy of growing marijuana when he 
sees him tilling the fields at night.

Dragnet, "The Big High" (S2, E8, Hulu)

More paranoid fascist dementia, only updated to Los Angeles in the 
late 1960s, and played with the straightest of straight faces. Jack 
Webb's tight-ass Detective Joe Friday was famous for slam-dunking 
hippies with one closed-loop rhetorical argument after another, but 
this 1968 episode deals specifically with the insidious evil of 
marijuana. "The finished cigarette is called a joint. It sells on the 
street from 50 to 75 cents. The seller claims it's heaven; the buyer 
soon finds out it's hell." Fifty-cent joints? No, yeah, that's 
heaven. A worried father wants Friday to arrest his daughter, a 
fresh-faced suburbanite who argues for marijuana legalization. The 
cops don't find any evidence, but in Friday's world, where there's no 
smoke there's always fire, and soon enough the young mother is 
fishing her dead baby out of the tub following a "wild pot party."

Sanford and Son, "Fred's Treasure"" (S4, E11, YouTube)

Note to self: Binge-watch all six seasons of Sanford and Son as soon 
as humanly possible. Even with star Redd Foxx missing due to a 
protracted contract holdout, this episode is a gold mine of dig-it 
wordplay ("Before we turn it in, why don't we do a little turnin' 
on?" says son Lamont's friend Ronald) and epic putdowns. Grady is 
taking care of Fred's garden while he's away, mistaking bushels of 
cannabis for wild parsley, and accidentally feeding a salad full of 
the stuff to a couple of cops. (That wouldn't get them high, but 
whatever.) "I've been eating a lot of salads lately, you may have 
noticed I'm getting lighter," says the white cop. "If you get any 
lighter, you'll be transparent," says Ronald. Belly laughs like that abound.

Three's Company, "Days of Beer and Weeds" (S2, E22, YouTube)

Never a show to shy away from recycling a used plot, Three's Company 
essentially remade "Fred's Treasure Garden" in this Suzanne 
Sommers-era episode. (The show was such a ravenous recycler that it 
returned to the weed well in the Season 7 episode "Going to Pot.") In 
this iteration, Jack Tripper and the gang are railroaded into 
clearing out Mr. Roper's garden, only to discover that the wild 
flowers they picked are actually cannabis. While Jack makes an 
ill-considered attempt to turn the pot leaves over to the police, 
Mrs. Roper unwittingly grabs some for her flower-arranging class. 
Unfortunately, this is a bit of a dud episode, with distinctly low 
stakes and very little of the show's trademark horndog innuendo.

Barney Miller, "Hash" (S3, E11, Crackle via Hulu)

I never quite "got" this single-set detective comedy from the 
mid-1970s, but this particular episode is pretty solid. Wojo brings a 
tray of brownies baked by his new girlfriend into the station, 
unaware that they've been laced with hash, and soon enough every cop 
on the force except for Barney is tripping major balls. There are 
some great moments for Jack Soo's Nick, who becomes obsessed with the 
word "mushy," and a clever integration of the side story about a 
feuding actor and critic who grow captivated with the "very 
Chekhov-ian" scene unfolding in front of them.

Punky Brewster, "Just Say No" (S2, E8, YouTube)

A spate of drippy, doe-eyed, anti-drug bromides plastered TV screens 
throughout the mid-to-late 1980s, and this treacly, shot-on-film 
sitcom was such a product of empty, Reagan-era fanaticism that the 
episode is actually called "Just Say No." Punky and her friend are 
initiated into a sixth-grade girl gang called the Chicklettes, where 
they dress up "like pint-sized Pointer Sisters," endure harsh 
initiation rituals and get offered hard drugs. The lead Chicklette 
pulls out a box that contains "some grass, a few uppers and a little 
nose candy," but Punky resists, eventually leaving the gang to form 
her own Just Say No club. This time-capsule-from-hell episode ends 
with footage of 8-year-old star Soleil Moon Frye leading a real-life 
Just Say No rally in Atlanta, which is upsetting on a number of levels.

Saved by the Bell, "No Hope with Dope"" (S3, E21, Hulu)

It's probably no surprise that the most inane and inscrutable moral 
compass with regard to drugs comes from this aquamarine and hot pink 
early 1990s nightmare/beloved institution. Hollywood star Johnny 
Dakota comes to Bayside High to tape an anti-drug commercial, 
befriending Zack and wooing Kelly in the process, but the gang is 
shocked to learn that their matinee idol is a secret stoner. Their 
moral outrage is so outsized that they refuse to appear in an 
anti-drug commercial, because "we felt it was wrong to be part of his 
lie." Whose side are you even on, kids? In my favorite scene, Zack 
and Slater confront a bathroom toker, but find that he's only smoking 
harmless tobacco. "That stuff can kill you, too," admonishes Slater. 
What do you mean, "too"?

The Cosby Show, "Theo and the Joint"" (S1, E17, Hulu)

Blossom, "The Joint"" (S2, E3, YouTube)

7th Heaven, "Who Knew?"" (S2, E4, Hulu)

Basically the exact same episode served three different ways: Mom 
and/or Dad finds a j-bone in the house, but they don't know which 
child it belongs to, which leads to a lot of hand-wringing about 
parental responsibilities and the imminent threat of things that 
you've read about in the newspaper. All three episodes are epic 
bummers (the 7th Heaven episode about broken family trust is only 
resolved when the parents eavesdrop on their child's prayers), 
although at least Blossom brings a touch of self-aware ribaldry to 
its dreary message-mongering. The lessons are all the same, though: 
prison-warden parenting works; drugs are literally being forced on 
children at school; there is a direct line between smoking your first 
joint and selling your ass for a single hit of crack and so on.

Home Improvement, "What a Drag" (S7, E16, YouTube)

Similar to the above "very special episodes" in its pandering 
attitudes about marijuana (coming from Tim Allen, no less ... he's 
like a real-life Johnny Dakota here), but this season seven 
installment of the long-running, long-unfunny sitcom is also an 
outlier in that the child is an eager smoker rather than a mere 
patsy. In fact, the first half of the episode is structured like a 
mystery: Tim finds a bag of weed in the backyard, and so he and Jill 
set up a sting, staking out their children from neighbor Wilson's 
yard. As in the 7th Heaven episode, the mom fesses up to being a 
teenage pothead who only stopped when her friend died from using the 
stuff, which is just insane.

Roseanne, "A Stash from the Past" (S6, E4, Netflix)

The ultimate marijuana-related bottle episode: Roseanne uncovers 
drugs that she thinks belong to her daughter's boyfriend David, only 
to find that it's her own 20-year-old weed, eventually sparking up 
with her husband Dan and big sister Jackie in an attempt to recapture 
their irresponsible youth. There is a wealth of peppery dialogue 
("That's just great, Dan, a very fine example you're setting for the 
kids, stealing their mother's stash.") and physical humor (Goodman's 
giddy hop when he realizes they're going to smoke the pot) in this 
gem from the tail-end of the show's prime.

Friends, "The One with the Stoned Guy" (S1, E15, Netflix)

None of the six insufferable lead characters on Friends were known 
for getting lit, although you have to imagine it might have made 
Chandler a little bit less of a complete pile of human garbage. Weed 
is super-tangential to the plot in this Season 1 episode, which 
mostly revolves around Chandler re-examining his life after getting a 
promotion at his soul-sucking job. However, the B story involves 
Monica preparing a fancy dinner for a prospective employer (a 
cameo-ing Jon Lovitz) who "blazed up a doobie" in the cab ride over. 
Meanwhile, the C story, concerning Ross learning to talk dirty to his 
new girlfriend, made my skin crawl.

Dinosaurs, "A New Leaf" (S2, E17, YouTube)

As though this Jim Henson Creature Shop-designed show about 
domesticated dinosaurs wasn't punishingly surreal enough, this 
brutally unpleasant episode concerns a mood-enhancing herb known as 
"Plant." The dino-family's teenage son discovers the joys of Plant 
when he spots it growing wild in the woods, and uses it to bond with 
his grumpy and overbearing father, Earl. It's not long before the 
entire village is hooked on Plant, blasting Hendrix and slacking off 
from work. "What could be bad about something that makes you feel 
good?" asks Earl, before deciding that "throwing away everything real 
and lasting in our lives for a cheap high has a downside." This show 
was made for children, by the way.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom