Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries - Last Resort: Stephanie Faracy

The Last Resort aired from September 1979 until March 1980 on CBS.

Summer resorts in the Catskill mountains of upstate New York have always depended on college students as a source of cheap, unskilled labor, and The Last Resort was no exception. Four of the college students working there for the summer were bright, romantic premed Michael Lerner ( Larry Breeding); bookish Duane Kaminsky ( Zane Lasky); bumbling overweight Zach Comstock ( Walter Olkewicz); and snobbish Jeffer Barron ( Ray Underwood).Also on the staff were Gail Collins ( Stephanie Faracy), a young woman who had run away from her wealthy husband and became the pastry chef despite a minimal knowledge of baking; Kevin ( John Fujioka), the Japanese chef who pretended not to understand English when it suited him; and Murray the maitre'd( Robert Costanzo), who ran the kitchen staff like an army unit, criticizing everybody and scraming continuously. Fortunately for the rest of the staff, Murray was not very bright and could easily be tricked by almost anyone.

Gary David Goldberg created and produced the show which was a ratings' failure when it premiered, having been pulled from the schedule after only 3 telecasts. It returned 2 months later on a different night, but never found an audience and was permanently canceled in the spring.

A Review From Time Magazine

by Frank Rich

The Last Resort (Sept. 19, CBS, 8 p.m E.D.T.) Late last season all three networks hatched Animal House sitcoms only to end up with a short-lived trio of turkeys. Three strikes and out, right? Wrong. In television, bad ideas don't fade away; they become cottage industries. The Last Resort is yet another Animal House rip-off — just as silly and doomed as its predecessors. If nothing else, it is easily the season's bravest kamikaze mission.

The gimmick is that the animals have moved out of the frat house and into sum mer jobs as waiters in a resort hotel. The hotel is about as festive as Disney World in a hail storm; the characters are so familiar you can turn down the volume and speak their lines yourself. In addition to the two romantic leads (Larry Breeding and Stephanie Faracy), the kids include one fat social retard, one bookish wimp and one wealthy, lock-jawed Wasp. For added measure the writers have stirred in a cook who re-enacts John Belushi's samurai routine and a maitre d' who resembles Danny De Vito's dispatcher from Taxi. Everyone yells a lot, usually about food and sex. Adults who sample this show may quickly tune it out to seek some food or sex of their own.

To watch the opening credits of the Last Resort and some other 1979 TV SHOWS go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYyqVqhyV3A