Mark Miller

We are in the middle of our series, “The Movie Came First,”and today we look at a show from the mid-sixties, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies.

Based on a book by humorist Jean Kerr, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies was featured on the big screen in 1960. Doris Day and David Niven star in this movie about a former professor who becomes a drama critic named Larry McKay and his wife Kate. The couple, along with their four sons, moved from Manhattan to an older home in the country. Kate settles into the community, warmly received by the local citizens while Larry continues his social life in New York City. Their lifestyles clash when she thinks he is having an affair and he has to figure out his priorities. In real life, Jean Kerr’s husband Walter was a theater critic for the New York Herald Tribune, and they did indeed have four boys.

If you have wondered where the title comes from, it’s a song Doris Day sings to a group of kids in the original movie.

The television series which aired in 1965 was loosely based on the movie. In this version, the Nashes live in Ridgemont, New York. Jim (Mark Miller) is a college English professor and Joan (Patricia Crowley) is a newspaper columnist. The four boys are played by Kim Tyler, Joel Nash, Jeff Fithian, and Joe Fithian, the latter two being twins. Rounding out the cast was neighbor Marge (Shirley Mitchell) and the Nashes’ huge sheep dog, Ladadog.

Joan was not the happy homemaker many sitcom wives were during this era; she actually disliked housework and her column was a humorous look at family life. Her four mischievous boys gave her a lot of material.

The episodes had some funny moments but were pretty typical for 1960s television. In one episode, the Nash family is the subject of a University-produced show, “At Home with the Faculty.” Joan wants to decrease their normal confusion and chaos by creating an unrealistic look for the family. Another episode, “Just While You’re Resting,” features Joan trying to please too many community residents by getting involved in too many organizations. Ellen Corby as the housekeeper makes one of her first appearances on the show trying to maintain order in the Nash household.

The Nash Family Four Years Before the Brady Bunch
Photo: ebay

The show was on NBC for two years and produced 58 episodes. In season one it was on Tuesday nights against Rawhide and Combat!. It did well in the ratings which makes sense to me considering the other two shows probably split the same audience. For season two, the network moved the show to Saturday nights where it was up against The Jackie Gleason Show on CBS and The Newlywed Game on ABC. When the ratings fell, NBC cancelled the show.

I always wonder a bit when I see a show that had 58 episodes but 40 writers. Kerr was given credit for all 58 episodes, but I could not find anything to indicate if she just received credit because of her book or if she actually participated in the writing. Of the other 39 writers, only 3 of them worked on more than two episodes and 80% of them only wrote one storyline. While I think having a community of writers for a show is a good idea, when you have that many different voices in two years, I think the scripts become more plot driven than character driven and we don’t get to know the characters intimately.

A rare quiet moment
Photo: 50plusworld.com

I do remember watching reruns of this show when I was younger and I remember liking it, but it was not one I specifically made time to watch. When I watched the opening on YouTube, I was immediately taken back to my childhood hearing the bouncy theme music. It begins with an animated sheepdog and then introduces each of the family members, landing back on the animated dog again. I could not find anywhere to watch the original episodes or buy DVDs of the show.

I admit I love all the Doris Day comedies, and Please Don’t Eat the Daisies is no exception. I feel like this is a running refrain this month, but all the movies we are looking at for this series were successful and fun-to-watch movies, so you’ll never feel that you wasted time watching these big screen treasures instead of their television cousins.

Happy Monday. It’s National Encourage a Young Writer Day. I love to encourage writers of all ages. If you’re a writer, you know the two golden rules of writing. (1) Write what you know and (2) Be original. With those two qualifiers, one would think there would be a myriad of great shows out there about writers. Not so. It took a lot of exploring on my part to come up with 12 shows about writers in the past 70 years!

If writers are writing what they know, it seems writers know much more about incompetent parents, complex medical surgeries, and dating bachelors than they do about writing and writers.

Don’t get me started on being original. Unfortunately, any viewer knows that when one genre show succeeds, the next year will feature ten more just like it; hence, the number of medical and police dramas currently on the schedule. This doesn’t hold true anywhere else in life. No grocer says avocados are so popular, let’s replace the oranges and apples with them. No radio station decides to play the top five songs to the exclusion of the other songs. That being said, I’ll jump off my soapbox before ranting about how the shows on today’s schedule are either amazingly written or not worth the time it takes to turn on the television. So, let’s look at shows about writers.

Apartment 3-C. In 1949 John and Barbara Gay played themselves. Living in New York City, he was a writer. The 15-minute show went off the air after one season. They moved to California where they raised their family and spent 66 years together. As far as I can tell, neither of them acted again, but John went on to be a prolific scriptwriter.

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Young and Gay/The Girls. Debuting in 1950 as Young and Gay, this series was based on an autobiographical novel written by Cornelia Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough. CBS bought the rights. After the first two episodes, the name was changed to The Girls. The premise of the show was that two Bryn Mawr graduates come to Greenwich Village after spending time in Europe, trying to develop careers as an actress and a writer. After a few more episodes, their acting career ended when the show was cancelled.

Dear Phoebe. In 1954, ex-college professor Bill Hastings, played by Peter Lawford, decided he wanted to try his hand at journalism. The option he receives is becoming Phoebe Goodman, providing advice to the lovelorn. Ironically, his girlfriend, Mickey (Marcia Henderson), is the paper’s sports writer. After one season, they both received advice to seek new work when the show was cancelled.

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My Sister Eileen. It would take half a decade before another show about a writer was produced. In 1960, My Sister Eileen aired. The concept will sound vaguely familiar. It’s based on a book and two movies about two sisters from Ohio who move to Greenwich Village wanting to be an actress and a writer. The sisters were played by Elaine Stritch and Shirley Boone. The only memorable thing about the show was the pairing of Rose Marie and Richard Deacon who went on to try their hand at another show a year later called The Dick Van Dyke Show.

The Dick Van Dyke Show. Hands down, this was the best comedy to debut about a writer. It was also the longest running show, going off the air five years because the cast wanted to quit while the show was still successful. Rob Petrie (Dick Van Dyke) is the head writer of the Alan Brady Show, creating scripts with Sally (Rose Marie) and Buddy (Morey Amsterdam). Mel (Richard Deacon) is the long-suffering producer. This is one of the first shows to concentrate on work life. We get to see what goes on behind the scenes of a comedy/variety show. While Rob, Sally, and Buddy have lives outside the office, they are somewhat married to their work. Sally is always hunting for Mr. Right. Buddy deals with more comedy at home because of his not-so-bright wife Pickles, although it’s obvious he is in love with Sally. Rob and Laura (Mary Tyler Moore) are both confident and intelligent adults and insecure parents, raising their son Richie (Larry Mathews) in New Rochelle. The show won an Emmy its first year and never left the top 20, producing 157 of the best-written sitcom episodes ever created.

Window on Main Street. Mention the name Robert Young, and most viewers fondly recall Father Knows Best or Marcus Welby. In this 1961 show, Robert Young plays Cameron Garrett Brooks, an author. After his son and wife pass away, he returns to his small home town of Millsburg to write about the town’s citizens. It must have been a very small town with few people to write about, because the series was cancelled after one year.

The New Loretta Young Show. Loretta Young starred in several shows using her name so it gets a bit confusing, but in this 1962 version, she plays Christine Massey, a children’s author and widow with 7 children. Living in Connecticut, she decides to get a job with Manhattan Magazine. However, after meeting the editor she falls in love and marries him. Perhaps the network had a policy banning inter-company marriages, because the show was cancelled after six months.

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Glynis. In 1963 Glynis Granville (played by Glynis Johns) moved to town. She is an amateur sleuth who solves crimes to have something to write about. Her husband Keith (Keith Andes) is an attorney. She consults with a former policeman Chick Rogers (George Mathews). The show only lasted three months. Jess Oppenheimer, the producer of I Love Lucy, apparently forgot this was a different show, airing episodes that were very Lucy-esque.

Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. In 1968, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies came to the small screen. Based on Jean Kerr’s book, it was also a movie starring Doris Day about the Nash family. James (Mark Miller) is a college professor and his wife Joan (Patricia Crowley) is a free-lance writer. The show featured their four sons, two of whom were twins, their large dog, and their housekeeper Martha (Ellen Corby). Faring better than most of our shows, this one lasted two years.

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. This show about a writer, a widow Carolyn Muir (Hope Lange) who moves into an old house in Schooner Bay in New England, appeared in 1968. The house turns out to be haunted by Captain Daniel Gregg (Edward Mulhaney), a captain who built the house in the 1800s. This show was also based on a movie. Captain Gregg is annoyed with the interruption and noise of the new family, but ultimately falls in love with Carolyn. Charles Nelson Reilly plays the Captain’s nephew Claymore Gregg. Dabbs Greer is Noorie Coolidge, the owner of a local lobster restaurant, and Reta Shaw is their housekeeper Martha. The show was on NBC for one year then moved to ABC for one year. Apparently, CBS declined its turn, so the show was cancelled.

THE DEBBIE REYNOLDS SHOW, Debbie Reynolds, Tom Bosley, 1969-70

The Debbie Reynolds Show. In 1969, another show produced by Jess Oppenheimer eerily reminiscent of I Love Lucy was on the fall schedule. Jim Thompson (Don Chastain) is a sports writer. His wife Debbie (Debbie Reynolds) is a stay-at-home wife who wants to be a feature writer. Jim discourages her, wanting her to stay home. Instead of Ethel and Fred, we have her sister Charlotte (Patricia Smith) and her brother-in-law Bob (Tom Bosley). After one season, the network decided they did not care if Debbie worked or stayed home and sent the crew packing.

Suddenly Susan. Jump almost thirty years to 1996 and we have another show about a writer, Suddenly Susan, starring Brooke Shields. Susan leaves her husband-to-be at the altar and is forced to ask her ex brother-in-law (Judd Nelson) to hire her back at his magazine. Most of the show is set in the workplace. Luis Rivera (Nestor Carbonell), Vicki Groener (Kathy Griffith), and Nana (Barbara Barrie) round out the cast and appear on all the episodes. (The photo above also includes Andrea Bendewald [the blonde] and David Strickland [laying down] who were in about half the episodes.) The show continued until 2000.

I should mention that because I focused on comedies I did not include Murder She Wrote or Castle, both having long runs of 12 and 8 years respectively. I did not include Everybody Loves Raymond because that show concentrated on his family life, and rarely revealed his writing profession.

I wish I had more encouraging words for writers who wanted to get involved in television. About the only thing I can tell you, is if you want to develop a successful show around a writer, make it a drama for job security.

thewritelife61

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