The Last Season was awful.

I'm watching that now and tho I've heard about the show before and watched snippets of Arden and Crenna before, the first time I actually saw an episode was about sixteen years ago on TVland, I've never heard of this transition taking place.
Even at its worst, the play between the characters was carrying it. I'm not sure why things changed. Even if Mrs. Davis was too old to do the show or Crenna probably wanted to leave, Stretch was more than a capable substitute (when he wore the dress, you could see him just daring Arden to laugh).

If they wanted Miss Brooks to be pursued instead of pursuing (Arden's delivering those one-liners with the same rapid fire), I think they could have brought in Allbright alongside Boynton.

I’ll have to check this out. I heard many of the radio series episodes, but have never seen an episode of the tv series. The radio series is actually quite funny. I was under the impression that Richard Crenna didn’t reprise his role as Walter Denton in the tv series, but from the looks of the credits, he did. It’s kinda hard to imagine that this squeaky voiced, geeky sounding kid, would later go on to be the man that trained Rambo :D

I’ll go into it with low expectations however. I can’t say why, but something tells me that it’s not going to transfer as well to TV, as it was on radio.