After reading Kristoffer A. Garin’s new book, I’ll never view “The Love Boat” the same way again. As a child whose preoccupied parents allowed her to stay up late to watch the show in the 1980s, I thought it was all about feathered hair and adult innuendo, Puerto Vallarta, and any port in a storm. Now “Devils on the Deep Blue Sea” (Viking Adult, 384 pages, $24.95) has helped me see it for what it really was: the greatest piece of product placement in the history of prime-time television.

When the show first aired in September 1977, Mr. Garin explains, cruise-shipping was an industry desperately trying to reinvent itself. Jet travel had made passenger liners obsolete; pleasure cruises existed merely as a way to make use of expensive old boats and as a vacation staple for the Social Security set. In fact, with so many retirees on board, writes Mr. Garin, “Maintaining an adequate inventory of coffins aboard was a significant enough expense for the cruise lines that one struggling operator had to make the cost-cutting switch from zinc caskets to wooden ones.”

Ten years after the premiere of the show, the number of passengers cruising out of North American ports yearly had more than tripled, and, while retirees continued to sail, hedonists came on board in droves. This, in turn, facilitated the creation of singles cruises, beer-chugging contests, and belly-flop competitions. “The Love Boat positioned cruising as exoticism wrapped in a security blanket,” writes Mr. Garin. “If you could get on the ship, the unspoken promise was – and you could get on the ship – you, too, would fall under its therapeutic, nonthreateningly aphrodisiacal influences.”

Just as hindsight has shown us that the adorable moppets on 1980s television shows were really proto-criminals who would grow up to rob video stores and escape from rehab facilities, a long view shows the mind numbingly chipper tone of “The Love Boat” as a happy face Hollywood placed over the dicier reality of cruising. In “Devils on the Deep Blue Sea,” Mr. Garin is pleased to turn up its seamy underside – from criminal cover-up conspiracies to strike-breaking, organized crime, illegal dumping of waste, even drug running operations that concealed the goods by welding contraband onto hulls on the bottom of the ships.

In looking back at the history of cruising, however, Mr. Garin isn’t simply content to write a “Behind the Music” style tell-all. He also makes very convincing cases that the pleasure cruise industry can serve as both an example of unfettered capitalism and freedom from government regulation (cruise ships exploit tax-law loopholes and fly under foreign flags to avoid U.S. taxes, minimum-wage requirements, and even criminal prosecution laws), and a microcosm of the global economy (workers from Third World countries serve First World passengers). On a cruise ship, he writes, “The world’s extremes of poverty and entitlement are coming face to face with one another in this odd zone of international waters – in such a shiny, happy atmosphere – and failing to grasp one another’s realities any better than they do with the vast Atlantic or the Pacific between them.”

Despite the salacious gossip and the keen analysis of the moral, ethical, and political implications of cruising found in the book, the main plotline of “Devils on the Deep Blue Sea” is the story of the growth of cruising from a negligible, almost novelty segment in the vacation industry into an incredibly prosperous near-monopoly. “Tourism is the largest industry in the world,” explains Mr. Garin. “And cruising is not only the fastest growing sector by far, but one of the few to see a genuine concentration of power.”

To that extent, the cruising industry would be better represented by a nighttime soap in the style of “Dallas” or “Dynasty” than a sex comedy like “The Love Boat.” Mr. Garin’s history of the industry – and particularly of the family-owned concern turned mega corporation that is Carnival Cruise Lines (also called “Carnivore Cruise Lines” by little fish in the industry) – has enough hostile takeovers, corporate betrayal, and political intrigue to fill several seasons of boardroom battles.

Having been weaned on “The Love Boat,” I admit I found the lengthy discussions of poison pills, merger machinations, and antitrust law dragged a bit. There were moments when I wondered if I needed to know this much about cruises – which, as the book progressed, seemed more like innovative restagings of “No Exit” than good ideas for a vacation. But overall, Mr. Garin’s deft style and eye for quirky detail (he quotes one shipboard survey that found only 13% of spouses would jump overboard to save their partner, while 25% would do so to save a favorite hat) keeps the story of the industry from getting waterlogged.

In fact, “Devils on the Deep Blue Sea” does its part to restore a measure of honesty to the false advertising of “The Love Boat.” It seems that at one point, cruising really was exciting and new, and the men who developed the mega-industry set a course for adventure. Aaron Spelling must be so pleased.

Ms. Gage’s book “North of Ithaca: A Journey Home Through a Family’s Extraordinary Past” has just been published by St. Martin’s Press.