Lots of people remember famous 1960s shows thanks to reruns, but then there were those little TV show experiments that we all seem to have forgotten.
A very polite cape
It makes sense that Captain Nice isn’t very well-remembered. The show had the odds stacked against it. The show had Buck Henry, the guy behind Get Smart, working on it, but even that couldn’t save it. It only ran for 15 episodes in 1967.
The show was about a man named Carter Nash, a police chemist. He took a mysterious formula. He became a superhero. Your standard Monday workday. But he was quite different from Batman because he was way more nervous and awkward. Maybe that’s why it didn’t work.
The other pill-powered guy
With a name as generic as ‘Mr. Terrific,’ it’s no surprise that the show never made it big. It aired on CBS during the 1966-67 season and featured Stephen Strimpell as Stanley Beamish. Stanley was a gas station attendant who managed to get superpowers from a government pill.
Weirdly, the pill only worked on Stanley. Nobody else was affected. Stanley was able to fly and fight crime until the powers wore off. The show lasted only 17 episodes.
Somewhere between two hits
A sitcom from Sherwood Schwartz? What could go wrong? He was the brains behind Gilligan’s Island and the Brady Bunch, after all, but It’s About Time was one of his rare failures. The show had 26 episodes. It was originally about two astronauts who crash-landed in prehistoric times.
Sound interesting enough. But the show changed direction after one season. Now, it was about cave people in the modern world, and people weren’t really into it. The theme song was the best part of it, honestly.
A London detour
You can’t get more sixties than the storyline of the Ugliest Girl in Town. It was about a Hollywood guy named Timothy Blair, played by Peter Kastner, who posed as a female model named Timmie. Yes, really.
It all happened after a magazine made a mistake and sent him to London. The show only got 20 episodes, and three of them weren’t even aired. The big part of the show was the Swinging London look. But that wasn’t enough to keep people watching.
Four weeks and gone
It didn’t disappear. No, the Tammy Grimes Show kind of disappeared before the season’s middle, with ABC axing the show after airing four episodes of sixteen. The remaining ones were made, though.Â
The show was about Tammy Ward, a rich woman whose uncle controlled how she spent her money. It was your regular kind of trouble-of-the-week sitcom. It even had Dick Sargent in it before his role in Bewitched.
The spy with an office job
TV liked spies in the ‘60s. It really liked them. The Double Life of Henry Phyfe tried to use that love, and it was about an accountant named Henry Phyfe. Henry gets pulled into spy work after being confused for a dead foreign agent.
Red Buttons, Fred Clark, Parley Baer, and Zeme North all featured in the show. Sure, it had the spy angle. But it didn’t quite nail the staying power. ABC aired it for only one year in 1966.
A man on the run
Run, Buddy, Run was all kinds of silly. It had the serious crime setup of an ordinary man, named Buddy Overstreet, overhearing mobsters planning a murder. Then came the ridiculous side. Buddy overheard the mobsters while he was in a steam bath.
The gang chases Buddy for the next few episodes. Fun times. The show wasn’t a hit, and it only ran for 16 episodes. It’s not all bad news, though. Lead actor Jack Sheldon, who played Buddy, became way more famous for his music and voice work.
The arrangement upstairs
You’d never be able to make Occasional Wife. It was a show about a single man named Peter Christopher, played by Michael Callan, who was desperate for a promotion. But being single? That was a no-no. So Peter did the obvious thing and hired a woman to act as his wife.
Patricia Harty played Peter’s wife, and she lived upstairs. The show kept dragging her into the fake-marriage emergencies whenever needed. Surprisingly, it actually lasted for 30 episodes. That’s a lot more than you’d expect for a show with that kind of premise.
The frozen family problem
Time for another time-traveling sitcom. This time, it’s ‘The Second Hundred Years,’ a show about a 1900s prospector called Luke Carpenter, who got frozen in a glacier. He wakes up in 1967. He’s very young, and very confused, as anyone would be. But that’s not all.
Luke’s grandson also appears in the ‘present day’. Bizarrely, the same actor who plays Luke, Monte Markham, also plays his grandson. Arthur O’Connell was Luke’s son and was older than his own dad in the show. Talk about family drama.
The broke rich people
A show called ‘The Pruitts of Southampton’ sure does sound fancy. That was the joke. It starred Phyllis Diller as Phyllis Pruitt. She was a Long Island socialite, trying to fake being rich after her family suffered tax problems. In other words, they were broke.
It only aired for a single season, and ABC later renamed it ‘The Phyllis Diller Show’ because they thought the name would help it out. But it didn’t really work.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
