Brett_Buck

John Larch plays the most detestable bully in TV history to the hilt. You can tell everything about him in his first 15 seconds of screen time, and he spends the next 45 minutes confirming your first impression. A very young Robert Culp is the eponymous good guy here, a schoolteacher with a generally gentle disposition and low self-esteem. By the end, Larch''s character has shown himself to be utterly contemptible bigmouth, with one final twist that makes all the other characters - and presumably the audience (including a 4-year-old me) - want to line up to beat the snot of him.

The episode was 100% predictable from almost the first line of dialogue, but eminently satisfying anyway. Larch made a career of playing bad guys on 50's and 60's Westerns but this one was a tour de force.

This show was very popular when I was a kid - but absolutely everyone I knew *despised it* with a passion. It was so sickly sweet and phony, the classic "cute kids" program.

For those watching today - no, the 60's weren't really like that, with deadly dull people doing deadly dull things, no real family operated like this one. Even the theme song was sappy, with French-sounding harpsichord music. We would hear that music and dive for the knob to change channels.

My parents hated it, too, this was the first TV program I heard him (mockingly - I think...) threaten to shoot the TV. Awful from start to finish.