Frances "Gidget" Lawrence (Sally Field) lives with her widowed college professor father in southern California. Her overprotective older sister Anne is married to the clueless psych student John Cooper. Gidget spends her time at the beach with her best friend Larue and surfing with the boys.
This TV show follows the movie Gidget starring Sandra Dee six years earlier. It suffers from a bad pilot but does recover to a fun little sitcom. Basically, young Sally Field is adorable and that saves the show. Heck, Sally Field is adorable at all ages. Her dad and her friend Larue get the time to build their characters. They become quite a fun endearing family unit. The sister could use some work to give some more dimensions. The show gets better and then get cancels after one full season. The pilot is probably a problem that couldn't be solved. It drops the show right after the movie. It's jarring. A very boring Moondoggie shows up as her boyfriend and then dropped immediately in the second episode. Without the movie, I don't think anybody would even know how she got the Gidget nickname. Not everybody have seen the movie. It would have been so much better to redo a simplified version of the movie as the pilot and eliminate Moondoggie. In an aside, I assumed that she has a flying nun outfit for Halloween in this show. I didn't realize that The Flying Nun is a different show later in her career. So you're telling me there was a superhero nun show.
This TV show follows the movie Gidget starring Sandra Dee six years earlier. It suffers from a bad pilot but does recover to a fun little sitcom. Basically, young Sally Field is adorable and that saves the show. Heck, Sally Field is adorable at all ages. Her dad and her friend Larue get the time to build their characters. They become quite a fun endearing family unit. The sister could use some work to give some more dimensions. The show gets better and then get cancels after one full season. The pilot is probably a problem that couldn't be solved. It drops the show right after the movie. It's jarring. A very boring Moondoggie shows up as her boyfriend and then dropped immediately in the second episode. Without the movie, I don't think anybody would even know how she got the Gidget nickname. Not everybody have seen the movie. It would have been so much better to redo a simplified version of the movie as the pilot and eliminate Moondoggie. In an aside, I assumed that she has a flying nun outfit for Halloween in this show. I didn't realize that The Flying Nun is a different show later in her career. So you're telling me there was a superhero nun show.