It took Sally Field more than a decade to live down starring in The Flying Nun, and to begin getting the respect as an actress she should've gotten for Gidget, the show she did before donning the habit. Based on Frederick Kohner's lightly J.D. Salinger-esque novel—or, more accurately, on the hit movie series adapted from that novel—Gidget cast Field as an impulsive, melodramatic high-school surfer, suffering adolescent crises alongside her widowed college-professor father in a sunny coastal California suburb. The 32 episodes on the four-DVD set Gidget: The Complete Series don't deviate much from the standard sitcom plots of the time: Field makes two dates for the same dance, joins a rock band, leads her friends in a mostly symbolic protest, and so on. But for a fortysomething woman, head writer Ruth Brooks Flippen had a real sense of the wistfulness and optimism of teenage life.
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