Date of airing: February 13, 1999 (CBS)
Nielsen ratings information: 10.85 million viewers, 7.2/13 in Households
written by: Jeff Melvoin
directed by: Adam Nimoy
There is no mystery any longer why the Hallmark Channel got the syndication rights for this series back in the day, considering this episode is nothing but a Hallmark romance novel adapted for an 82-minute long TV movie, only shortened by 40 minutes, because EARLY EDITION is not a Hallmark Channel show. This episode is a nice little Valentine’s episode, a nice little love story, and you can stick it on a Top X list of episodes about successful romances, because it happened to be a solid episode, even if there was not much EARLY EDITION in this hour – as if the writers decided they needed to finally get Gary and Erica together after more than half a season of flirtations, and they wanted to do that in a romantic episode. And everyone got a romance in this episode: Gary and Erica finally kissed, and even Marissa got herself another boyfriend, although here is to hoping that cab driver Emmett Brown is not going to turn out to be a psychopath or serial killer. And let's not forget that the two guest characters of the week also got stuck in a happy romance. This episode was all about happy endings.
Meanwhile, I was a bit disturbed by the opening credits, because they have changed again. After Shanesia Davis was removed as the voiceover and a random dude was giving the premise of the series, that premise now changed, in addition to Kristy Swanson having been removed from the opening credits and included as a "special guest star" again, where she was for the entire first half of the season. I have no idea how things like that are happening, and how much of a contractual issue there is behind that, but the fact that the title intro was changing again must have meant that no one knew what to make of the show, right? Did the show turn into a mess behind the scenes?
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| They are talking about baseball with their mouths open. |
Anyway, this episode was about love. If the writers had removed the romances involving the main characters, maybe there would have been more time to focus on Andy Miller and Dr. Suzy Pietro, but then again, would this have been a Valentine's episode otherwise, if there was only one love story to be told? Although one could argue that Marissa and Emmett deserved a bit more screentime as a potential couple in love, considering the fact that Marissa did not have a lot to do as a character since the season premiere, showing me once more that the writers had no idea what to do with a blind character in the series. This episode gave me the feeling that Emmett was dropped into Marissa's lap randomly (making m think he will be thrown off her lap randomly as well), to add to the hour's running time and to push it up to the necessary 45 minutes. But hey, Emmett was written into this episode to give Marissa something else to do than be the manager and co-owner of the bar, because being that kind of character did not do well for Marissa – she became forgettable by being a character who was only depicted at her place of employment.
But maybe I am starting to trash-talk this episode now, which it does not deserve. Every once in a while, a heartwarming story is appreciated and needed, and I loved the Hallmark-type romantic cliches in this episode, even if it reminded me of most of the useless Hallmark Christmas movies I have watched during my existence (all the ones that came to be before Bill Abbott had to step down as CEO following the Zola same-sex wedding commercial disaster from 2020). Every once in a while, I do not mind a story in which the boy and the girl meet, they fall in love with one another against all odds, and they have to battle the people around them who want to prevent their love from happening, and cannot believe there is love out there that does not belong to them.
Like Steven Burroughs, who foolishly believed he was engaged to Suzy, even though she never said “Yes” to his proposal (at least not during a scene on-camera). Kind of silly of the guy to think that he got the girl when he received no confirmation that he actually got the girl, but he happens to be a rich white guy who smelled the privilege of success after popping a question in a very annoying way (it should be illegal to use human organ transplant boxes for stunts like this).
Or Andy's agent Elliot Rosenfield, who did everything wrong in his job, even after he saw Cameron Crowe's film JERRY MAGUIRE, a film that told its audience that the life of a sports agent is absolutely wrong if they do not care about their clients' well-beings. By the way, an eight-year contract worth $60 million for playing baseball? I have no clue about the sport (only what I can gather from Hollywood movies and that one time I was in the stadium for a lower league baseball game in Canada), but from what I know about football (or what North Americans understand under "soccer"), that is kind of a lame and cheap contract. That’s $7.5 million a year, which, granted, is making you a star in whatever sport you are playing, but Andy was treated like a baseball superstar and (aging) wunderkind in this episode – his agent could have at least gotten $10 million a year out of the Cubs, which means Elliot was not only able to make sure that his client is feeling well and rested and happy, but he also did not get the most amount of money for him.
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| Gary is confused as to how he got flowers from a cat. |
By the way, this show is set in Chicago, and after the Great Fire of 1871 and Al Capone, it was only a question of time when the writers would choose to get the Chicago Cubs into the narrative, and depict the love/love relationship between Chicago's finest residents and their baseball team that was unable to win a World Series for the longest of times. A decade and a half later, would the show have gone nuts in its narrative after the Cubs’ World Series win in 2016? Did Dick Wolf’s Chicago franchise do anything with that? After all, I only saw half of the first season of CHICAGO FIRE, so I have no idea if the Cubs were ever present in the shows' narratives – and now I am scared to find out because of the franchise's many spin-off shows and the fact that I need to find time to watch more than 600-plus episodes.
