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Room 222: "I Love You Charlie, I Love You Abby"

Apparently I spoke too soon when I described the title character of the "El Genio" episode and his girlfriend as the only Hispanics on this series. During the last five minutes of this episode, one of the title characters of this episode was called by the name "Charles Moreno" -- and Moreno, of course, is a popular Spanish surname. Which, of course, means Charlie was Hispanic -- although not necessarily Mexican.*

Whether or not it was intentional from the writer's point-of-view that the audience saw the character in question as Hispanic seems doubtful. After all, the character was rarely described as being Hispanic the same way the title character of "El Genio" was. Nor was he given any of the conventional "Hispanic" traits that sloppy TV writers like to give to Hispanic characters. (For example, bad accents, frequent use of Spanglish, etc.) Nor was his impending marriage to what seemed to be a rather WASPy white non-Hispanic girl seen as being especially controversial. I would like to give the writer the benefit of a doubt and assume that this was the way he chose to make up for the more contrived elements of the "El Genio" episode but alas, there was no commentary on this episode so I guess I will never know for sure.

Anyway, the main concern shown during the episode concerning Charlie and his would-be bride Abby was more about their age than their ethnicity -- and the closest the episode came to a conventional ethnic joke lay in the fact that tacos were served at Charlie's impromptu bachelor party. Mr. Dixon and his girlfriend Ms. McIntyre were greatly concerned about Charlie and Abby's plans to get married at the end of the school year -- but the first attempt they made to get them to change their minds only resulted in Charlie and Abby moving up the date of their elopement. It was not until after the above-mentioned bachelor party and Abby's bachelorette party that Dixon and MacIntyre found a way to convince the young couple they were not ready to get married yet -- and even then it was a close call.

So the idea of a Hispanic character on a TV show dealing with issues which were not necessarily ethnic issues would seem to be a good thing, right? Even if I find myself preferring the way such issues were handled on old I Love Lucy episodes.

* Contrary to popular belief, Hispanic is not a political euphemism for "Mexican" and can be used to describe almost anyone with Spanish-speaking ancestors. Of course, since it is often considered a political term, it is not always used that way but it should be.