Former NCIS star Mark Harmon was named People’s second-ever Sexiest Man Alive in 1986, the same year his three-season run ended on the medical drama television series St. Elsewhere. Audiences were shocked by Harmon’s chilling performance as real-life serial killer Ted Bundy in the 1986 television miniseries The Deliberate Stranger. With his public profile at such an elevated level, Harmon embarked on a feature film career with the 1987 comedy film Summer School, in which he plays Freddy Shoop, a high school gym teacher who’s blackmailed into teaching a wild group of students in a remedial English class during the summer.
In contrast to Harmon’s smarmy bachelor character in the 1989 romantic comedy film Worth Winning, the actor exudes goofy charm in Summer School, which provides an effective showcase for Harmon to demonstrate a flair for broad comedy. While Summer School received generally negative critical reviews at the time of its theatrical release, the film was a modest box-office success and has accumulated an enthusiastic cult following over the past 35 years. Indeed, no high school film in which a teacher organizes a classroom screening of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre can be entirely bad.
Mark Harmon Plays a Lovable Idiot in ‘Summer School’
In stark contrast to the competence and precision that defined Mark Harmon’s iconic portrayal of Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs on NCIS over 19 seasons, his character Freddy Shoop in Summer School is an utter fool. Freddy first appears in Summer School as a cynical, lazy Los Angeles gym teacher with a low opinion of himself and his students. This pessimistic attitude is reinforced by Freddy’s treacherous boss, Vice Principal Phil Gills, who threatens to strip Freddy’s tenure unless he foregoes a Hawaiian vacation to teach a group of equally unmotivated students over the summer.
As an underachieving teacher who’s as disappointed to be stuck in school over the summer as his students are, Freddy begins Summer School as the teaching equivalent of Bill Murray’s initially sarcastic summer camp counselor character “Tripper” Harrison from the 1979 comedy film Meatballs. However, just as Meatballs exudes sweetness through Murray’s appealing presence, Harmon is consistently likable as Freddy in Summer School, in which he emerges as the kind of teacher everyone would like to have, or have had, in high school.
Summer School further distinguishes itself by transcending its sheer silliness with a theme of personal improvement. In contrast to the miracle-worker teachers from such uplifting teacher-oriented films as Dead Poets Society and Stand and Deliver, Freddy and his students have very realistic expectations of one another. The summer session ends with the students taking a big test that most are doomed to fail. While Summer School begins and ends with Freddy and his students being failures, the characters nonetheless attain a much higher level of existence than where they started.
Harmon’s Brief Movie Career Peaked With ‘Summer School’
Summer School finished its theatrical run with a domestic box-office gross of over $35 million. The modest box-office success of Summer School compelled distributor Paramount Pictures to groom Harmon to become one of the studio’s in-house stars. This short-lived experiment began with Paramount pairing Harmon with the legendary Sean Connery in the 1988 crime film The Presidio. However, Harmon was overshadowed by Connery in The Presidio, which became a box-office disappointment and raised serious questions about Harmon’s commercial viability in feature films.
Harmon followed The Presidio with the 1988 coming-of-age romantic drama film Stealing Home, a personal project for the actor. However, while Stealing Home attained cult classic status over time, the film grossed less than $8 million at the domestic box office. Badly needing a box-office hit, Harmon’s career reached a major turning point with the 1989 theatrical release of the romantic comedy film Worth Winning. The film was a dismal failure and necessitated his return to television, where he has left a historic legacy over the course of a 50-plus-year career.
‘Summer School’ Is an Underrated 1980s Comedy and Nostalgia Blast
Summer School was directed by comedy legend Carl Reiner, who previously directed frequent collaborator Steve Martin in the acclaimed 1984 body-switching fantasy comedy film All of Me. However, while Summer School opened strongly at the box office, the film was derided by critics for its perceived lack of imagination and originality. In Roger Ebert’s merciless half-star review, Ebert described Summer School as one of the worst films of its era. Ebert wrote:
“The movie contains: practical jokes, field trips, rebellion, acceptance, evil principals, absent girlfriends, a birth, a scene with lots of special-effects makeup, a display of total teaching ineptitude, and some very mild sex. It doesn’t even have the courage to be vulgar, to be the kind of mass trash that the ads promise. It’s a vapor-film. You see it, you leave the theater, and then it evaporates, leaving just a slight memory, something like a vaguely unpleasant taste in the mouth.”
One of the admirers of Summer School is star Mark Harmon, who has consistently expressed gratitude for the film and its effect on his career. In a 2011 interview with The A.V. Club, Harmon said:
“Freddy Shoop! No, I get that. People wanted a teacher like Freddy Shoop. Heck, I wanted a teacher like Freddy Shoop. I give all that credit, every bit of it, to Carl Reiner. He was so special, and it was so much about his opinion. He was the one who grabbed me and said, ‘I want you to do this role, you, specifically.’ It’s funny: He made that decision based on an interview he saw me doing when I was promoting The Deliberate Stranger.”
