It was an era when sitcoms just kept getting weirder. "My Favorite Martian," "Mr Ed,*" "The Munsters."
Okay, okay, "Petticoat Junction," "I Dream of Jeannie," "Gidget" the whole point is to show off pretty girls. But "My Living Doll" fits both categories, right? And all those shows with dead parents - mothers usually, "The Courtship of Eddie's Father," "My Three Sons," "Bachelor Father," those are because it's an opportunity to do semi-adult situations with an undercurrent of pathos, and a really cute father to try and marry off. (I'll marry you, Mr. Corbett! Sobs) I hit that one fifteen years ago, Missing Family Members.
But this one...? Something was wrong with those people.
*"He'll give you the answer that you'll endorse. He's always on a steady course..." Really? These are professional lyricists? Three-martini lunch and a rhyming dictionary.
According to Jerry van Dyke, he passed on playing Gilligan in order to do this show. He said something like, "Compared to Gilligan's Island, this looked like Shakespeare."
ReplyDeleteI didn't hear of this until long after it aired, and thought the concept too unhinged to bother being curious about. Your post induced me to look it up on Wikipedia, and it looks even worse than I thought it would be. Yet the production team had some genuine talent onboard.
ReplyDeleteI wonder what happened. Did somebody propose the weirdest thing they could think of on a bet, and when the 3-martini backer liked it, found they couldn't back out?