Rant #1,813: Hey Joe(y)

This past New Year's weekend was a good time for me to catch up with television.

No, not the trash that is on TV today, but the stuff that was on eons ago, when I was a kid.

I started watching a show that I never watched as a kid, and honestly, did not know even existed until about 20 years ago, when it had a brief run on the old Nick At Nite.

It was "The Joey Bishop Show," and no, I am not talking about his short-lived talk show, which I did remember from my childhood, and which I wish would be brought back from the dead so we all could watch it today.

I am talking about the sitcom that Bishop starred in, a sitcom that somehow lasted four years--on two different networks--and which existed in both the black and white and color world of TV in the mid 1960s.

The show has been exhumed by Antenna TV, and it had a marathon this past weekend to usher it into the network's programming schedule.

It started out on NBC in the early 1960s, somehow got through a horrid first season in black and white--a season where someone named Marlo Thomas made her acting debut as "That Girl" percolated--changed formats for the next season, chugged on for a second and third season in color, and then was picked up by CBS, where I do believe it reverted back to black and white.

And then it left TV forever, never really spoken about again until it was revived by Nick At Nite in the 1990s.

The show was produced by Danny Thomas, was written by some of Lucille Ball's writers and produced at Desilu Studios, and after you watch a few episodes, particularly of the second and third season, you see that the show was sort of a mix of "Make Room For Daddy" and "The Lucy Show"--and a mostly substandard mix of those two hit shows.

Joey plays Joey Barnes, a TV comic with a late night talk show, who has a wife (Abby Dalton), and eventually becomes a father with a son (played by Dalton's real life toddler!). He also has various managers, and the super of the building he and his family live in is none other than Joe Besser--yes, that Joe Besser, of Three Stooges fame.

With all of this rolled together, one would think you would have a sitcom that is really hilarious, but the quality of the material really isn't that good. Bishop looks bored most of the time, basically strolling through his scenes, seemingly barely comatose.

The show does feature a wealth of cameo appearances by some of the biggest stars of the day--including Bob Hope, Buddy Hackett, and Danny Thomas himself--but it just doesn't help much.

Dalton, who during this period became a semi-regular on the original "Hollywood Squares" game show, has a permanent smile on her face that looks like it is painted on, or glued on with spray as her hair appears to be. Barnes' managers/writers--portrayed by veteran comics Guy Marks and Corbett Monica--basically joke their way through the whole thing, throwing one one liner after another.

And also, later in the series, Bill Bixby--less "My Favorite Martian"--appears in several episodes.

The only one who shines on the show is Besser, who is really giving it his all here. He makes the most of his limited screen time, and the running joke on his early episodes is that once he gets into something at the Barnes home, his wife--with her screechy voice, and who is never seen--always calls for him. Yes, probably unknowingly, "The Big Bang Theory" stole this schtick from this show, but whatever the case, Besser is the one standout on the show.

There were, incredibly, more than 100 episodes of the show that were filmed, but I have read that one episode will not be shown by Antenna TV, basically because according to TV historians, it was filmed and quickly destroyed by the powers that be.

Vaughn Meader was an impressionist during the early 1960s, and became very successful through his TV appearances and record albums. He specialized in doing a right-on impression of John F. Kennedy, and the show had him as a guest star on one of its shows slated to run in 1963.

In November 1963, as we all know, JFK was assassinated, and any comedy having to do with the fallen president--he was ripe for parody, with his good looks and accent--went with him to the grave.

The producers of the show decided that Meader's appearance was an insult to the fallen president, and not only didn't the show ever air, the episode evidently was destroyed, never to be seen by the public.

Whether the episode exists somewhere is up to conjecture, but right now, it does not exist, and won't be shown as part of the series.

Anyway, "The Joey Bishop Show" is now being shown as a regular part of the Antenna TV lineup, and it is worth a look, if for nothing else to see what TV was way back when.

Yes,  today's TV offerings are pretty much garbage in my mind, but not everything way back when wasn't that good either, and unfortunately, "The Joey Bishop Show" was not that good.

Give it a look! It does have its moments.