The Love Boat
American comedy drama television series

The Love Boat is an American romantic comedy-drama television series created by Wilford Lloyd Baumes that originally aired on ABC from September 24, 1977, to May 24, 1986. In addition, three TV movies aired before the regular series premiered, and four specials and a TV movie aired after the series ended. The series was set on the cruise ship Pacific Princess, and revolved around the ship's captain Merrill Stubing (played by Gavin MacLeod) and a handful of his crew, with passengers played by guest actors for each episode, having romantic, dramatic, and humorous adventures.
The series was part of ABC's popular Saturday-night lineup of the time, which also included Fantasy Island until 1984. The executive producer for the series was Aaron Spelling, who produced several television series for Four Star Television and ABC from the 1960s into the 1990s.
The series was nominated four consecutive times for a Golden Globe Award for Best Television Series – Musical or Comedy between 1978 and 1981, without winning any. Gavin MacLeod and Lauren Tewes also received several Golden Globe nominations for their roles in the series. In 1997, the episode with segment titles "Hidden Treasure", "Picture from the Past", and "Ace's Salary" (season 9, episode 3) was ranked No. 82 on TV Guide's 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time list.
Episodes
Cast
Gavin MacLeod as Captain Merrill Stubing
Bernie Kopell as the ship doctor, Adam "Doc" Bricker; Kopell played a different character, Dr.
The public source identifies “The Love Boat” as american comedy drama television series. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Love, Boat and American.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q181998. VIAF identifies the subject as 177011251. The Library of Congress control number is n83216859. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1977, 1986, 1984 and 1978.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Love Boat” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.