Foleys Love Cool Grieco

Of the aspects of Rags To Riches that just straight do not work -- and they are myriad -- one of the most bizarre is how infrequently boys, and the Foley girls' interest in same, figure in a plot. This is a show that's primarily about four girls, aged seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, and fourteen (I don't remember/care how old fucking Mickey is supposed to be), and here is a complete list of the romance-based plots: Rose goes out with a date rapist; Diane dates a bad boy who actually has a heart of gold; Patty gets a crush on a lifeguard; Marva dates a college boy. I'm up to the fourteenth episode of the show now, which has somehow managed to be only the fifth to have a central dating plotline. (Under any other circumstances, I would applaud the show for featuring young female characters who have more going on than chasing boys, if the other episodes hadn't revolved around Rose's scientific illiteracy, Marva's attempted arson, and Patty's inability to free herself from a scarf.) And who's the lucky lady giving her hormones a workout? Surprise: there are two! It's a love triangle! And what a triangle it is.

First, let's go even further back in time to when Nick, fighting in World War II, has his life saved by his quick-thinking buddy Joey, which we see in a sequence in which the twenty-six-year age difference between Joseph Bologna and Robert Firth, who plays Joey, is supposed to be erased by the choice to shoot in black and white. It is not.

In the present, Nick is preparing for Billy, Joey's son and Nick's godson, to come stay at the Foleys' for a while due to a disagreement between Joey and Billy. The girls are nervous about how it's going to change the household to have a boy living in it, but their concerns are allayed when they see the most recent photo of Billy Nick has.

Look, I've mostly given up on this show trying at all to sell the idea that it's really taking place in the early 1960s, because if I didn't I would literally never stop complaining about ROSE'S HAIR. But this photo is infuriating. We're about to meet Billy, who's played by Richard Grieco, and I certainly believe that this is a real school photo of a young Dick. But since he would have been twenty-two at the time this episode was shot, this photo probably dates from, let's say, somewhere in the 1974-77 range, and from the haircut to the collar on that shirt, it fucking shows. Why bother using a real photo of Richard Grieco? "Because girls love to see what their heartthrobs looked like when they were younger?" True, they do. But this is only the second credit on Grieco's IMDb profile, meaning that when this photo was broadcast to the world, he ain't shit. If we're generous and call this, by now, 1962, then we should be looking at a photo of a kid from the mid-'50s. SOME TEAMSTER WHO WORKED ON THE SHOW COULD HAVE JUST BROUGHT IN HIS OWN.

God, moving on, so the girls are all like, who cares about sharing a bathroom with this nerd, and come down to dinner in their afterschool slobwear, but oh no, he's fucking dreamy!

Diane is in the middle of getting over some other goon, so she's carrying on too much to care about fixing herself up for dinner like Rose, Marva, and Patty hastily do, but realizes her error as soon as she comes down.

As the Foleys all get to know more about Billy he...well, he seems like a real asshole.

You play folk music? With that hair? Anyway, it's clear that he's vibing with Rose, currently demoted to the second-biggest pinko in the house as long as Billy's staying there. But Diane, I guess by virtue of being blonde, automatically starts acting like she's entitled to him, even though when the subject turns to which folk artists he likes, she can only contribute that she likes The Platters, and doesn't understand why he laughs. Cue your adapted-for-bad-television Cyrano de Bergerac plotline, with Rose tutoring Diane in how to be...Rose herself, basically. She lets Diane pass off Rose's poems as her own, and gives her modern-poet cheat sheets so she can keep up the conversation with Billy, someone with whom she has zero in common. And by the way, remember how last week we all had to spend a good minute of the episode looking directly at Joseph Bologna's naked sunken old-man chest? Well, if you were as into Grieco as all the Foley girls were, at least your patience was rewarded.

I don't want to say this one-and-done Rags To Riches appearance is solely responsible for Grieco becoming the second- or possibly third-tier himbo he went on to be on 21 Jump Street the year after this aired -- there were stops at Who's The Boss and The Bronx Zoo in between -- but this show's producers sure worked the hardest to make him happen. In addition to making him a sensitive folkie (complete with a guitar we never see him play), he also draws...

...sings...

...and cries...

...to Nick, about his daddy issues -- specifically that he'll never live up to his hero dad's legacy. But his most important qualification as boy crush material is that he sees through all of Diane's blonde flash and figures out that the girl he's really liked all along is Rose. (He does this not through insight into how fake Diane is but by happening to find out from Mickey that "Diane's" binder of poems is Rose's, but still.) And even though Rose had stood aside out of loyalty to Diane, thinking Diane couldn't handle Rose being with a dude Diane had set her sights on, when Diane figures out the situation, she manages to be happy for them -- and why not? Billy's about to go make up with his dad and never come back to the show again. Bye forever, titular "Hunk In The House"! Let's hope your powers of deduction sharpen when you're supposed to be keeping tabs on drug dealers.