"The Waltons" was a really nice series about a loving family struggling to survive during the Great Depression.
Too bad that CBS and the show's creator, Earl Hamner, insist on sullying a great TV memory with an extraordinarily weak reunion movie like "A Walton Easter" (Sunday, 8 p.m., Ch. 2).You'd be far better off watching a rerun of just about any episode of "The Waltons" on cable's Family Channel than spending two hours with this muddled, predictable teleflick.
To begin with, the premise is all wrong. The time line just doesn't fit, and the producers show an amazing lack of respect for their audience by even attempting it.
"A Walton Easter" is set in 1969, and we're told that John (Ralph Waite) and Olivia (Michael Learned) are celebrating their 40th anniversary.
Let's see. That would mean that they were married in 1929.
That would also mean that the majority of their seven children were born before Mama and Daddy Walton got married.
Let's think about this for a moment. John-Boy (Richard Thomas) was in his late teens and the show was set in the mid-1930s when it debuted back in 1972. By the time World War II began (on the show) in 1941, he'd was a college graduate - which means John-Boy had to have been born no later than 1920.
Not only is that nine years before we're now told that his parents got married, but that would make him 49 in 1969. And yet he's portrayed as a young husband who's about to become a father for the first time.
In the series, four of the Walton boys - John-Boy, Jason (Jon Walmsley), Ben (Eric Scott) and Jim-Bob (David W. Harper) served in the military during the war. However, under this new time line, none of them could have been older than 12 when the war started or older than 16 when it ended.
In the series, oldest daughter Mary Ellen (Judy Norton) gave birth to the first Walton grandchild, John Curtis, about a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor. That would make him 29 in 1969 - and yet Mary Ellen's children are grade-schoolers in "A Walton Easter."
There are brief appearances by Ellen Corby as Grandma Walton and Mary Jackson and Helen Kleeb as the dizzy Baldwin sisters, all of whom would have to be well over 100 in 1969.
And in the movie, youngest daughter Elizabeth (Kami Cotler) is in her mid-20s - which means she would not even have been born until several years after the series began.
All of which is not only dumb but disrespectful to longtime fans of "The Waltons." The producers might as well have run a notice at the top of the movie saying, "We know none of this makes sense, but we're hoping you're too stupid to notice."
Hamner and Co. actually painted themselves into a corner with 1993's "The Walton Thanksgiving Reunion," which was set in 1963 and contained similar time-line problems. But it begs the question of why those problems would be exacerbated by pushing "A Walton Easter" six years further into trouble.
Apparently, it was to make some sort of tie to the first moon-landing, which is nothing more than a brief note in the movie and has no real tie to what's going on.
And what's going on in the movie presents a whole 'nother set of problems beyond the time distortions.
John-Boy and his extremely pregnant wife, Janet (Kate Mc-Neil) are at odds. He's longing to return to Walton's Mountain, while she doesn't want to leave New York.
That might be a nice storyline - if it weren't an almost exact rerun of the plot of the last reunion movie, 1995's "A Walton Wedding."
Elsewhere, Olivia - now a teacher - is worried about one of her students. Elizabeth returns home after a couple of years of globe-trotting to discover that her boyfriend, Drew, has a new girlfriend.
Now, despite the fact that she left him behind to see the world, Drew is treated like the bad guy in this plot line. (And, without even seeing the movie, you can probably make a darn good guess how it will all turn out.)
The family lumber mill isn't doing so hot (again), so Drew comes up with a plan to make rustic chairs and sell them. This plot line also takes a predictable turn - just before it's completely dropped without any sort of resolution whatsoever.
Whether that's due to bad writing or bad editing is impossible to say.
And all of those Waltons make for more than a bit of confusion, what with various spouses having disappeared from early "Waltons" incarnations without explanation.
Then there's the whole "Easter" part of "A Walton Easter." The movie makes much of the fact that John-Boy and Janet can't wait to spend the holiday back in Virginia, but then they're on their way back to New York before Easter without giving it a second thought.
Only another predictable twist - Janet going into labor - keeps them on Walton's Mountain.
The tie to Easter is so tenuous that it's easy to imagine network executives saying, "Hey, we need a movie for Easter. How about doing something with `The Waltons?' "
And the producers saying, "Well, we have this idea. We'll make it fit."
Once again, the shame of all of this is that "The Waltons" was such a fine series and "A Walton Easter" is such a mediocre (at best) movie.
If they can't do a reunion movie right, then they just shouldn't do one at all.