YMMV / Highway to Heaven

• Anvilicious: Incredibly so. Then again, that's not a bad thing (see Values Resonance).
• Fan-Preferred Couple: In addition to the many one-shot characters who get together in their own episodes, there are a fair amount of fans of Mark/Jonathan.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • An early episode deals with Mark making a promise to God to quit smoking and almost relapsing, the turning point coming when he buys a pack of cigarettes with a large note from God on the inside reading "BREAKING YOUR WORD CAN BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH". Victor French died from lung cancer after filming the final season.
  • The child actress Brittany Benov briefly appears as young Bonnie in the final episode. Her character is later shown as an adult in her 30s. Sadly, Benov would never be that old, as she became severely depressed from bipolar disorder, and ultimately died in her 20s of a drug overdose.
  • Also, the episode shows a Bad Future adversely affecting her character, among others. In real life, she certainly did have a bad future.
  • In an early episode, Mark has to deal with quitting smoking. When Jonathan chastises him for starting again, he reveals that in his mortal life, he died of lung cancer. Michael Landon died of a different type of cancer- pancreatic cancer.
  • The mere fact that Landon and French both died of cancer can make any episode featuring a Littlest Cancer Patient (or in one case, many of them) become this.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Brittany Benov's appearance is also this, considering the environmental theme of the episode she's in. A few years later, she would voice Delphineus, your dolphin friend, in Ecoquest: The Search for Cetus.
  • There is an episode titled "One Winged Angel". No relation to the trope or the song that named it.
• Moment of Awesome: Jonathan and Mark have several of those, see it here.
• Values Dissonance: In "A Special Love" the word "retard" is used quite a bit.
• Values Resonance: Most if not all of the themes it tackles, such as drug abuse, parental neglect, prejudice (especially racial) and school bullying, are still incredibly relevant today.
• Writer on Board: The episode "Child of God," written and directed by Michael Landon, has Jonathan commenting that a woman's previous affair with a married man was not a sin at all. It's hard not to see this as an apologia for Michael Landon's own life choices, which included an extramarital affair with a woman he met on the Little House on the Prairie set, an affair which ended his second marriage and resulted in his third one.

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