Top Qs
Timeline
Chat
Perspective
He & She
American television series From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Remove ads
He & She is an American sitcom aired on CBS as part of its 1967–68 lineup.
 | This article needs additional citations for verification. (August 2021) |
 | This article uses a non-standard episode table. |
He & She is widely considered by broadcast historians to have been ahead of its time.[1] Its sophisticated approach to comedy was viewed as opening doors to the groundbreaking MTM family of sitcoms of the 1970s, beginning with The Mary Tyler Moore Show in 1970. The character of Oscar was openly the pattern for the Ted Baxter character, for which creator Leonard Stern granted permission.[1]
Remove ads
Synopsis
Summarize
Perspective
He & She stars real-life married couple Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss as Dick and Paula Hollister, a successful cartoonist and his wife, a social worker. Hollister's cartoon Jetman had been so successful that it was now a network television series starring egomaniacal actor Oscar North (Jack Cassidy), as the titular Jetman. North constantly argues with Hollister over the interpretation and direction of the Jetman character. Folksinger-actor Hamilton Camp played the role of handyman Andrew Hummel at the apartment building where the starring characters lived, and Kenneth Mars played firefighter Harry Zarakartos, who would often drop in on the Hollisters' apartment via a plank connected to the firehouse across the alley.
Writers Chris Hayward and Allan Burns, who created the series The Munsters, were hired by executive producer Leonard Stern (co-writer and producer of Get Smart) as story editors for He & She, for which they won the 1968 Emmy Award for comedy writing.[2] The show received four other Emmy nominations that year, including nominations for Prentiss, Benjamin, and Cassidy. However it was not nominated for Outstanding Comedy Series.[3]
Burns would go on to be a writer and co-creator (among others) of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, of which He & She is considered a major forerunner. The show also earned three of the four Writers Guild nominations for Best Writing in a Comedy.
Despite the strong lead-in provided by Green Acres (a top-25 primetime show that season), He & She was cancelled after one season, although selected episodes were later rerun as a summer replacement series by CBS in 1970 following the cancellation of The Tim Conway Show. Reruns later aired on the USA Network in 1985-86 and TV Land ran selected episodes of the series in 1998, but it has not been seen since then. Cast members, such as Richard Benjamin, felt that the Green Acres lead-in actually hurt the show because the two series were so different in their approaches, rural and urban, respectively. The series was also a pioneer in the portrayal of the working wife, which was not yet in vogue on television.
According to the show's creator Leonard Stern, Michael Dann, president of CBS at the time, called He & She "the best show I ever cancelled. Stern believed that the time slot, after Green Acres, hurt the show's possibility for success, despite favorable reviews, because the two were incompatible. Stern believed that Cassidy, as the "first suggested gay" in a TV series, "did unnerve the network somewhat" by stepping "beyond the boundaries of what they considered to be good taste."[3]
Remove ads
List of episodes
Summarize
Perspective
Remove ads
References
External links
Wikiwand - on
Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.
Remove ads