"Dream On"

wrap-up and season six clips

I've already covered seasons one and two with collages which were made from the DVD set. The results are chronicled here, and the actual collages can be found in the back issues. I still have those DVDs, so I'll go back and make film clips when I finish covering the rest of the series. I'm going to do seasons 3-6 because they have rarely been covered at all, and have never been catalogued show-by-show. That's because they've never been released to DVD. The broadcast clips for seasons 3-5 are better than VHS quality, but not up to DVD standards. The clips for season six are apparently made from VHS tapes of broadcasts.

The nudity started to come less frequently in the final year of this series because Martin was reconciling with his ex-wife and was staying faithful to her whenever they were together. Most of the previous seasons' nudity had been generated by Martin's active sex life. In this season the bare flesh was often generated by passing fantasies, and therefore was not only occurring less frequently, but was generally shorter in duration when it did happen. Martin had a fling in episode 15, then hooked up with his ex, so the eleven episodes from #16 through #26 had almost no nudity. Eight of the eleven had none at all! The entire season was free from male nudity, including the episode when Martin gets into the porn industry.

In terms of image quality, I have to apologize in advance. I have not been able to find any watchable episodes of Season 6. The following clips capture all the action, but the sharpness ranges from poor to abysmal. In two instances Mr Skin had better videos, so I included them in the .zip files, but those vids covered only a small percentage of the episodes. If anybody knows where to find HQ versions, let me know.

Aside from the matters of nudity and source quality, well, frankly, this series was really annoying me by the time the final season got underway. I was really into the series in seasons one and two, but it wore out its welcome. One problem was that the series was starting to repeat the gags from the old films, so the ideas which had been clever in season one had become completely predictable by the time season six rolled around. In addition, the funniest idea (Judith's god-like second husband, whose triumphs in every field of human endeavor made Martin seem utterly insignificant) was basically shut down when the writers killed that character off so Martin and Judith could reconcile.

Those were not the biggest problems. The real failing of this series, the difference between this and the great sitcoms like Mary Tyler Moore, is that it failed to create any characters with whom we might empathize or root for, even a little. Martin was a lying, spineless weasel. His ex-wife Judith was stiff and pretentious. His best friend Eddie was unrealistically shallow - sort of an African-American version of Ted Baxter. His boss Gibby and his secretary Tobey were both one-dimensional assholes. His parents were gone from the picture. Everyone got a happy ending, but I just didn't care.

Nudity report for all of season six, a long series which ran almost continuously from July of 1995 to March of 1996 (there was a two-month hiatus for the Thanksgiving/Christmas season):

• Episode 1 - breasts from Colleen McDermott (FILM CLIP) and large breasts from Meadow Williams (she's cute as well) (FILM CLIP).
• Episode 2 - none, but Annette O'Toole exposed a lot of cleavage, and I like her, so I made a (FILM CLIP).
• Episode 3 - breasts from Sandra Reinhardt (FILM CLIP). She was later to be known more commonly as Sandra Ferguson.
• Episode 4 - none
• Episode 5 - breasts from our old pal Barbara Alyn Woods (FILM CLIP), who was playing a different character from the one she played in her previous nude appearance in this series.
• Episode 6 - none
• Episode 7 - none
• Episode 8 - none
• Episode 9 - none
• Episode 10 - breasts from Sara Suzanne Brown (FILM CLIP).
• Episode 11 - none
• Episode 12 - none
• Episode 13 - quite a bit of nudity, as Martin enters the porn business as a scriptwriter. Breasts from Karen Roe (FILM CLIP), and from a bevy of "porn actresses" (FILM CLIP) including Kim Anderson, Azalea Davila, and Carol Boudreau. Traci Bingham is supposed to be in there, but I can't figure out where.
• Episode 14 - none
• Episode 15 - Melora Walters shows a breast while in bed with Benben (FILM CLIP). This was "Martin's" last fling before he reconciled with his ex.
• Episode 16 - none
• Episode 17 - none
• Episode 18 - Tamara Landry was topless in one of Martin's fantasies (FILM CLIP).
• Episode 19 - none
• Episode 20 - Azalea Davila returned to expose her breasts again (FILM CLIP). Another woman was topless in the same scene in a virtually interchangeable role, but strangely enough, only Azalea was credited.
• Episode 21 - none
• Episode 22 - none
• Episode 23 - Martin fantasizes about large-breasted women while he showers (FILM CLIP). The tootsies in question are Karen Russell, Jennifer Leigh Edwards, and Traci Adell.
• Episode 24 - none
• Episode 25 - none
• Episode 26 - none
• Episode 27 - breasts from Stacy Terrio (FILM CLIP); breasts and buns from Gail Harris (FILM CLIP).