Apple's Way

In an era of Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons showing Americans that it was cool to get back to the land, Lorimar churned out this sickly sweet rural transplant series about a family (Frances Lee McCain, Ronny Cox, and kids Vincent Van Patten, Kristy McNichol, Eric Olsen, Patty Cohoon) from LA deciding to go hang their hats in Iowa. Of course, the usual period of adjustment (IE: angry kids) was dealt with, and when Grandpa (Malcolm Atterbury) showed up we got a nice long weekly exposure to how things used to be (“Ice cream cones cost a nickel when I was a kid, you know”). Added to that, when the friends from LA came up to spend a weekend with the family, then considered moving out permanently but had to go home early when corporate VP dad had a helicopter sent out to get him, you could almost see the tears in the eyes of the children. They should have run a dental warning before each episode, the thing was so dripping in sugar. In the end though, this post-Vietnam ‘let’s love our family unit again’ experiment couldn’t keep up with the trials and tribulations of the Walton and Ingalls clans, getting the axe at the end of season two.