The show is harmless and modestly entertaining but also painfully sincere in trying to be About Something, hoping to connect with a wide family audience. Seen today in many respects it's much more dated than some earlier shows from the 1950s and early-'60s. In its own way it's as unrealistic and hopelessly out of step with the times as Dragnet 1970. Those chiefly responsible for it, creator James L. Brooks and Gene Reynolds, would soon move on to the much more popular and prestigious Mary Tyler Moore and M*A*S*H, respectively, and while today they're probably mildly embarrassed by the show's worst excesses, Room 222 undeniably helped move the situation comedy into a new realm. It's not like any show that came before it, and it paved the way for the much better shows to follow.

Room 222 seems to have been very closely patterned after To Sir, with Love, the 1967 movie starring Sidney Poitier as an idealistic, inspirational inner-city high school teacher. The TV series stars Lloyd Haynes, who resembles Poitier, as Pete Dixon, an American history teacher at (the fictional) Walt Whitman High School in Los Angeles. Michael Constantine co-stars as the school's much put-upon principal, Seymour Kaufman, with Denise Nicholas as guidance counselor Liz McIntyre (and Pete's kind-of love interest), and 23-year-old Karen Valentine as Alice Johnson, a sunny but bumbling student teacher.

Apparently the show was conceived as something like a dramedy, and its creators fought hard to get the standard generic laugh track removed by the end of the first season. (It does pop up a few times in season two, as if to inform the viewer that some of the student's more inflammatory remarks should not be taken seriously and are really jokes, get it?) The show resembles the Reynolds-produced M*A*S*H during that program's first few seasons: little in the way of serious drama, but a sitcomy/half-serious approach to real issues.

The main problem with Room 222 is that episodes are almost exclusively issue- rather than character-driven. It's like a TV show produced (and directed, for that matter) by Stanley Kramer at his heart-on-his-sleeve worst. In "The Lincoln Story," for instance, Mr. Dixon is up for a Teacher of the Year award but the visiting judges (Dana Elcar and Irene Tedrow) arrive just in time to hear some students blast Lincoln as a hypocrite for pre-Civil War speeches in which he declared a willingness to continue slavery if it would preserve the union. Indulgent liberal Pete lets the students have their say while Lincoln-admirer Elcar's blood boils in the back of the room. (Holly Near, the respected folk singer, guest stars as an annoying Lincoln apologist. Her performance is awesomely bad.)

Though it's interesting to imagine seeing this back in 1970, when such issues were rarely addressed in American television drama at all, let alone on a half-hour sitcom, ultimately the show is not much more than kids arguing in a classroom for 30 minutes, Mr. Dixon gently steering the discussion among the stock student types: class clown, perennial nay-sayer, bookworm type, etc. Haynes's too-good-to-be-true teacher is appealing but not really believable, and the teenagers all sound scripted, never real.

At this point in television history it would be too much to expect a show like Room 222 to deal with truly relevant problems like teen pregnancy, gang violence, sexual identity, depression and suicide, but Room 222's scripts are overwhelmed by stubbornly abstract concepts: free speech in "Write On, Brother" about an underground student newspaper, apathy toward student government in "The Laughing Majority." But where are the characters? Some shows, like "The Lincoln Story," have no story to tell, just an issue-of-the-week to kick around the classroom for 25 minutes.

Though scorned for decades, the earlier Leave It to Beaver, which in its final seasons had Wally and Beaver entering high school, had a core emotional truthfulness of a kind sorely needed in Room 222. The focus was on their problems, not their parents', and not their teachers' as in Room 222's case. On Leave it to Beaver, Ward Cleaver's typical 1950s middle-class father was refreshingly imperfect. Sometimes he screwed up and the kids suffered. But on Room 222 Mr. Dixon is so idealized he's like a statue of Virtue. Principal Kaufman may not be crazy about Dixon's liberal teaching methods or the great leeway he gives his students, but he gamely puts up with it. Walt Whitman has a few bad eggs, ineffective and bellyaching instructors, a few trouble-making kids, but these are always in the background or their problems are minor. And what Leave it to Beaver did so well, explore the kind of everyday problems real teenagers grapple with, is completely absent here, shut out, apparently, by those issues of the week.

Video & Audio

As with too many Shout! Factory classic TV releases, Room 222 looks pretty mediocre. The packaging insists the DVDs were "created from the best surviving video masters available to [us]," but that doesn't excuse 20th Century-Fox for providing such poor masters in the first place, especially when decent film elements exist, or Shout! for not insisting Fox provide them with better material to work with. Episodes seem to source the same scratch-filled opening titles sequence. The rest of the episodes look somewhat better, though still unforgivably soft and mucky. These are mass-produced DVDs and not DVD-Rs; indeed, except for the poor quality of the outdated masters the set looks like any other classic TV season set. Episode titles and original airdates are included. The set has 26 episodes on four single-sided, Region 1-encoded discs. The mono audio (English only) is okay. There are no subtitle options and the discs are not closed-captioned. Unlike season one, there are also no Extra Features

Parting Thoughts

Not having seen the show since at least the late-1970s I was curious to see if Room 222 holds up. It doesn't, though it's interesting to watch it if only from a television history perspective, as a now generally forgotten show that served as a segue between the goofy slapstick sitcoms of the '60s and the more sophisticated and adult fare that followed. Shout! Factory's notably bad masters are a real drag, however, so a purchase is not recommended. Rent It.

Stuart Galbraith IV's latest audio commentary, for AnimEigo's Tora-san DVD boxed set, is on sale now.