People sometimes justify their Secret Shames with nostalgia. I can’t do that here. The series went off the air in 1979, and my four-year-old self didn’t watch a lot of primetime TV. There’s nothing that ties Kotter to my childhood. In fact, I was in my twenties before I ever saw an episode. I think it was my somewhere between my ‘pretentious film nerd’ phase and my ‘self-consciously ironic’ phase, for those of you keeping score. This was back when Nick at Nite devoted Friday nights to Kotter marathons, and in no time at all, I was obsessed.
I can’t figure why I love it so. Welcome Back, Kotter embodies so much of what I hate about pre-Simpsons comedy. Poorly-developed characters, plotlines based on either coincidence or tortured misunderstanding, occasional stabs at relevance thoroughly processed into blandness, and of course, a crushing reliance on catchphrases. Oh, the catchphrases. I don’t think any other series, except for the aforementioned The Simpsons has boasted more catchphrases. Of course, The Simpsons has two hundred characters and more than four hundred episodes – the catchphrases are a little more spread out there. Kotter ran for 72 episodes and boasted seven regular characters. (I refuse to count the post-Gabe Kaplan fourth season as part of the series. It’s not Welcome Back, Kotter without Kotter.) I think you’d be able to isolate several scenes made up of nothing but catchphrases. This is something I should hate. And yet, every time Freddie Washington says, “Hi there,” I laugh.
