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December 15, 2002
NEW YORK -- Love may have been exciting and new when The Love Boat ruled Saturday nights in the 1970s and '80s.
Now, the actor who played Capt. Stubing's daughter is among the stars on the latest blind date show trying to prove it's just as exciting -- if not new -- to watch strangers struggle for small talk over Cobb salad.
Jill Whelan -- Vicki from The Love Boat -- is one of the celebrities on Star Dates, which matches stars and singles with mixed results. The series premieres at 10:30 p.m. Sunday on E! Entertainment Television.
Star Dates combines the fly-on-the-wall element of dating and celebrity reality programs with the where-are-they-now nostalgia factor. Besides Whelan, Gary Coleman from Diff'rent Strokes, Dustin Diamond from Saved by the Bell and Kim Fields from The Facts of Life go looking for love.
The first episode features Butch Patrick, who played Eddie Munster on The Munsters from 1964 to 1966. (Without the widow's peak and pasty skin from his child actor days, you'd never recognize him; he has wavy reddish hair and freckles.)
Now 49, Patrick splits his time between making appearances at nostalgia conventions and working as a consultant on haunted houses at Halloween. Having just gotten out of a six-year relationship, he says he's "looking for someone to fill the emptiness that I have at the moment."
E!'s vice president of development, Kary McHoul, said everyone has had a disastrous blind date, and that's why so many of these shows exist.
"I think it's relatable, and that's what people like, whether they're watching a mean-spirited dating show and they can laugh, or one like this where there's a twist," McHoul said.
The cable channel's talent bookers worked the phones to find actors to participate, and casting scouts searched for the regular people, who had to pass background checks.
"That was the hardest thing," McHoul said. "You don't want them to be stalkers of the celebrities."
The "greatest episode ever," she said, features Phyllis Diller and is scheduled to air Jan. 12.
But the twice-married Diller admits she didn't appear on Star Dates to make a love connection. She announced this year that she'd no longer perform standup comedy, so she agreed to do the show for "a little exposure without taking my clothes off."
"I've got beaus," she said -- a lawyer and a Realtor. "To me it was a television job. I didn't expect to have anything on a white horse."
Star Dates premieres at 10:30 tonight on E! Entertainment Television.