This month we are in the midst of What in the World? Every sitcom has the word “world” in it. On deck today is My World . . . and Welcome to It. This half-hour show was based on the cartoons of James Thurber. It debuted in 1969 and was on the air for a year.
William Windom played John Monroe a cartoonist who works for a magazine similar to the New Yorker called The Manhattanite. Monroe lives with his wife Ellen (Joan Hotchkis) and their daughter Lydia (Lisa Gerritsen). John often daydreams about his daughter’s future and the “older” Lydias were played by Talia Shire and Cindy Williams.
The name John Monroe was Thurber’s alto-ego in his book Owl in the Attic. He frequently daydreams and those are cleverly incorporated into the series.
The episodes opened with John observing different aspects of his life. The use of the cartoons created a fantasy life dream world where he escaped life situations he could not process.
Mel Shavelson created the show for NBC. He wrote and directed the pilot with one of my all-time favorites Sheldon Leonard as executive producer. The animation in the series was done by DePattie-Freleng Enterprises.
Rounding out the cast was Henry Morgan as Philip Jensen, a magazine writer based on Robert Benchley and Harold J. Stone as editor Hamilton.
The show was on Monday nights at 7:30 and was up against Gunsmoke. While it had a lot of great reviews from the critics, the viewers were not there in droves. Percy Shain of the Boston Globe referred to the show as “a joy and treasure.” Bob Williams of the New York Post wrote that it was “it’s warm, it’s witty, and it’s a sophisticated cut above the best of the TV network situation comedies.”
Not every critic treated it so kindly, however. Jack Gould of the New York Times felt it was “hackneyed gibberish relieved only by an occasional Thurber drawing” and Norman Mark of the Chicago Daily News decided that it “tried to appeal to all parts of the TV audience and failed.”
Perhaps Barry Harrison of the Washington Evening Star understood the show better than the other critics and had “an uneasy feeling [that] it is not long for TV.” His prediction came true when the series was canceled after one season.
According to Howard Anderson Jr. in his Television Academy interview, one of the major reasons for the cancellation was that it was so expensive to do the filming with a blue screen behind Windom for all the animation.
And then after it was canceled, it won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy and Windom picked up the Emmy for Leading Role in a Comedy. The series it was up against included Love American Style, Room 222, The Bill Cosby Show, and The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. Windom won over Lloyd Haynes in Room 222 and Bill Cosby of The Bill Cosby Show.
The fans did send a lot of mail to the network, but with the so-so ratings and the fact that the animation made this one an expensive show to create, NBC did not put it back on the schedule.
After the show ended, Windom created a one-man play based on Thurber’s works and toured the country throughout the seventies. Perhaps if the network had given it some time after winning the Emmys, this show might have been more successful. It sounds like an interesting concept, although I also get the feeling that it might not have appealed to women; many of the descriptions I read discussed John’s fantasies that his wife and daughter were things to escape from. It’s worth taking a look at and seeing how it has fared over the last sixty years.
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