The Love Boat was a lightly comic romantic anthology series (with laugh track) which ran on ABC from 1977 until 1986. The hour long series, set on a cruise ship, was generally divided into three individually titled stories per episode. As the title implied, the majority of the plots involved shipboard romance. The passenger manifest was filled by an array of , usually a mixture of older film and TV legends and current names, many of whom returned time and again. The regular ship's crew (led by Captain Stubing) bridged the storylines and were occasionally allowed a one-shot romance of their own.