Lentorama 2009: Great(?) Moments in Catholics on TV

April 22, 1988: Teenage girls in an all male Catholic high school? Wacky!

Just the Ten of Us was a spin-off of Growing Pains that took the recurring character of Graham Lubbock, a gym teacher played by Bill Kirchenbauer and sent him, his wife and their eight kids off to California so he could teach gym at St. Augustine's Academy, an all-male Catholic high school.

Part of the deal, though, is that Coach Lubbock's four teenage daughters would also get to go to St. Augustine's. Considering that Lubbock took umbrage when boys would look at his daughers at whatever suburban high school Growing Pains had, you can imagine how it went when his daughters were the only girls in school. The powers that be at the school didn't care for the arrangement much either, but made it work thanks to the school's headmaster, Father Frank Hargis (played by Frank Bonner, known to most as Herb Tarlek on WKRP in Cincinnati).

The thing I never got about this arrangement was why the girls couldn't go to public school. Or whatever sister school St. Augustine's had. I know, hard to believe an '80s sitcom would be so contrived. I also don't know if the Lubbocks were actually Catholic (not that it's a deal-breaker for attending Catholic school). Then again, they did have eight kids.

The show did reasonably well, but ABC apparently cancelled it because they wanted the TGIF lineup they were cooking up to have shows all from the same production company. Which is how the Alphabet turned in a solid performer for Going Places, a TV show about TV show writers who also happen to share a house (contrivance being widely abundant, apparently). It never caught on, and with good reason.

Just the Ten of Us also gave a couple of actors and early stop on their career, as one of the Lubbock daughter was played by the toothsome Jamie Luner (Savannah, Melrose Place) and Dennis Haysbert (24, The Unit) played Coach Lubbock's assistant.