TV critics, like everyone else, sometimes get caught down rabbit holes. This morning I was on with Humble & Fred (except I was speaking with “Humble” Howard Glassman and Maureen Holloway; she was sitting in this month for regular co-host Fred Patterson).
Howard, who had to assume I had seen it, asked me to give a quick description of the AppleTV+series Severance, still a Top-10 draw on the Realgood streaming charts.
I had to admit that I had not seen it.
Hey, there are only so many hours in a day. Sure, the “Peak TV” age has slowed somewhat but, nevertheless, you can’t see everything.
Not that I don’t have my distractions, especially in these dark, stupid times. I have been bingeing something lately, but it dates back to an even darker (just as dark?) time, 1968. Well, 1967-68. Way before pronouns were called into question. I’m talking about the one-season wonder, He & She, starring Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss.
This is a series that holds up incredibly well because it represents a strong and unique convergence of talent. It premiered in the fall of 1967, with a very funny but ultimately incompatible lead-in: Green Acres. He & She was this wry, sophisticated sitcom starring the real husband and wife team of Benjamin and Prentiss as married Manhattan-ites Dick and Paula Hollister. You want sophisticated? These two (gasp!) slept in one double bed! He played a cartoonist who drew Jet Man, this Buck Rogers-like space hero. She (gasp again!) had a job, working at an airport.
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The comic strip begat a fictional TV series which starred David Cassidy’s dad, Broadway star Jack Cassidy. When I was ten, Cassidy was the reason to watch the show. His character was ego run amok, just the ham-bone of all time, a dimpled, preening, cartoon character. He made Billy Van look like a wallflower. There was plenty of Cassidy’s Oscar North in what would later become Mary Tyler Moore‘s Ted Baxter. In the elegant title sequence for He & She, Cassidy’s movie star pose is the laugh-out-loud mug shot of the last century.
Also stealing scenes was a young Kenneth Mars — pre-Mel Brooks’ “The Producers” and “Young Frankenstein” — as Harry, the Hollister’s kind-hearted fireman next door. In a unique bit of set designer-y, there was a plank between their apartment and the firehouse. Harry would walk the plank once or twice an episode, deliver a bit of business, and walk back.
There were unseen characters as well, including a neighbour who would yell back when the Hollisters got loud in the middle of the night. The series also featured diminutive folk singer-turned comic actor Hamilton Camp as the Hollister’s “Eldin,” a fix-it man who never seems to leave.
All of this sprang from the mind of Leonard Stern, a veteran writer-producer with a wide range of top TV comedy credits but let’s just land on Get Smart! Ten episodes were written by Allan Burns and Chris Hayward, who won the series only Emmy Award for an episode featuring guest star John Astin titled, “The Coming-Our Party.”
Prior to He & She, Burns and Hayward created The Munsters and survived My Mother the Car. Burns went on to co-create The Mary Tyler Moore Show with James L. Brooks. Another MTM writer, Treva Silverman, also contributed an episode to He & She. David Davis, who went on to develop, produce and write on Rhoda, was an associate producer on He & She. The great Jay Sandrich, who directed over 100 Mary Tyler Moore episodes, presided over all but three He & She‘s.
Almost everyone named above had something to do, at one time or another, with The Bob Newhart Show — the series that, for me, feels the most He & She-ish.
Benjamin and Prentiss performed before a studio audience (in Los Angeles, not New York) and they thrived on that stage. The two leads are a delight, adept at both dialogue and physical shtick. Prentiss, who rose to fame in 1960 in “Where the Boys Are,” is so winning and original you can’t help wonder why this series did not last seven seasons instead of one.
The answer is that it was ahead of its time. Had it been launched three years later, the same fall as MTM, they would have made an irresistible one-two. When CBS did their infamous rural purge just two or three seasons later, this show they threw away in 1968 was exactly what they were trying to fill their schedule with in 1970.
There are 26 episodes and you can find most of them on YouTube. Sadly, a 4K giant screen does nothing for these blurry, colour-faded old transfers. These videos look like, as my photographer friend Gene Trindl used to say, they were shot through a silk stocking with a leg still in it.
Still, remarkably, the comedy timing and smart dialogue shines through. The happiest of endings? Benjamin and Prentiss are still with us in their mid-eighties, married for 64 years. Ye gads, can we fix their series? Shout Factory, or somebody, can He & She be restored? Besides the laughs, there is a bounce and an optimism, a sunny slice of the ’60s, that we need now more than ever.
