Come aboard, they&apos;re expecting you! More than three decades after the Love Boat first set sail on ABC — and more than two decades after it made its final voyage — cast members Gavin MacLeod, Bernie Kopell, Ted Lange, Fred Grandy, Lauren Tewes, and Jill Whelan reunited for a very special episode of The Talk.
"I didn&apos;t think we&apos;d even get through the pilot," Grandy, who played Burl "Gopher" Smith, confessed of the Love Boat&apos;s humble beginnings. "The first pilot that we did, we did over Christmas. So there was this tremendous feeling of, &apos;Oh, the business is rewarding us with a Christmas cruise.&apos; But nobody thought it would go beyond that. I mean, as Gavin pointed out, the critics hated it. They said it would sink like the Titanic."
"They put us on at 10 o&apos;clock on Saturday night, which is normally a graveyard shift," he continued. "And then we started beating shows like Kojak and Carol Burnett, and then we said, &apos;You know, something might be going on here.&apos;"
Something was indeed going on. The Love Boat eventually became one of the most famous shows in television history. It even spawned a 1990s spinoff, The Love Boat: The Next Wave, that aired on UPN from 1998 to 1999.
"All of a sudden, this thing caught on," Grandy recalled on The Talk. "And we started getting these wonderful ratings. Gavin, of course, always believed, from the very first day, [that we would be a hit]."
That may have had something to do with his costars. "It was a gift to work with them," MacLeod (a.k.a. Captain Merrill Stubing) said of his cast mates. "They all had a specific talent."
The Talk&apos;s Love Boat reunion also featured a surprise appearance by a special guest: Charo! The Spanish-American actress appeared eight times on The Love Boat in the 1970s — and she could not have been happier to see her former costars.