We are in the midst of a month of blogs that feature sitcoms we don’t hear much about anymore. Today’s series is Occasional Wife.
In September 1966, the show debuted on Tuesday nights on NBC.
The show was about Peter, a junior New York business executive (Michael Callahan). When he realized married men are more likely to be promoted at his company, Brahms Baby Food, he asks hat check girl Greta (Patricia Harty) to pose as his wife for company functions. When he offers to pay for her rent and art lessons, she agrees, thinking it will be an occasional performance, but every time someone from the office drops by, Peter runs upstairs to bring her down to his apartment until they leave. One of the funniest parts of the show was the tenant played by Bryan O’Byrne who watches Peter and Greta running up and down the fire escape.
If you wondered if the name Patricia Harty sounds familiar, yes it does. She was Blondie and we talked about her in the first blog of this series.
The opening is reminiscent of Dragnet with its introduction “There are eight million stories in the Naked City. Some are violent, some sad, but one of them is just plain cuckoo. This is a modern fable about two young people who make a bargain only to find out they were going to get a lot more than they bargained for. We call our fable Occasional Wife and it stars Michael Callan and Patricia Harty.”
The series was created by Lawrence J. Cohen and Fred Freeman. Vin Scully, legendary sportscaster, provided the narration for the show. It started off ranked 18th but by the end of the season, it had dropped to 64th and was cancelled.
The show was up against The Red Skelton Hour and The Rounders. If you have been reading my blog any amount of time, you probably have heard me complaining about Red Skelton. I honestly could not stand watching the show and did not find it at all funny, but I also have read way too many accounts of what a jerk he was to his writers, cast members, and anyone else who he worked with. However, at this time, his show was in the top ten. The Rounders on the other hand, probably didn’t take many viewers away from this sitcom. The premise of the show, according to imdb.com, was that Howdy Lewis and Ben Jones are in debt to Jim Ed Love, second richest man in the state. They find some happiness with girlfriends Ada and Sally at the Longhorn Cafe.
It sounds like Peter and Greta were flat characters and the comedy only relied on the situation of the fake marriage. Viewers would probably have liked to see some chemistry between the two and allow them to struggle with getting closer instead of both being happily single. There must have been some chemistry there because the actors married after the show ended. Just like their sitcom, their marriage failed to last two years.
This sitcom was one of the first series to eliminate the use of a laugh track. Now canned laughter is an industry standard, but they decided to can the canned laughter and not invite a live audience. I wonder if this might have affected viewers whether they knew it or not.
Bob Claver discussed his time producing this show in a Television Academy interview. Claver thought the show was funny and peppy, but he said they couldn’t make it a hit, even with Harry Ackerman as executive producer.
As with the other two series we discussed this month, Blondie and My Sister Eileen, you might be better off to run up or down your own fire escape and skip watching the show to get in a few extra steps.
thewritelife61 