Proving that eventually, every TV show that has ever existed will be out as a DVD set, you can now order Season 1 of the 1968 series, The Doris Day Show. I am not suggesting you do this, as I do not recall it as being a great show, but I will provide an Amazon link if you want to see for yourself.
More interesting than the show is its history, especially of that first season. In the sixties, Ms. Day was married to an agent named Marty Melcher, who proved the old Show Biz adage that one should not manage one's spouse's career. It works once in a while but it usually doesn't, and the Melcher-Day saga is as fine an example as you'll find of the "doesn't" variety. For a time, the damage Melcher did to his wife's stardom consisted of signing her up to do movies that she didn't want to do. She'd read a script like the one for the 1967 Caprice and say, "Well, thank God I don't have to do garbage like that," and Melcher would tell her, "Uh, I already signed you up for it. You have to do it." And do it she did…under duress.
Doris was one of the highest-paid movie stars in the world but she was seeing very little of that loot. Melcher was then in partnership with an investment manager named Jerome Rosenthal, and every cent she made went into some new oil drilling scheme, or a hotel or some other venture "guaranteed" to yield mega-bucks. Onlookers would later wonder why the Melchers didn't just live comfortably, as they could have, off what she made: Why plunge it all into risky investments? The answer, it was suggested, had something to do with Marty's ego and his determination not to let it be said that he just lived off his wife. The investments were to yield money that he could claim as his income, even though they were being funded by her money.
The trouble was that, unbeknownst to Doris, those investments were wiping out her money, not increasing it. It would never be clear to what extent this was because the ventures were uniformly unsuccessful or if Rosenthal was just pocketing the bucks…but Melcher found himself in the position of a losing gambler who was desperately throwing more cash on the table, trying to get even. In his panic for funds, he turned to television.
CBS was, at the time, worried that Lucille Ball would soon retire and they saw Doris Day as the star of a sitcom that could be cultivated to take over Lucy's exalted place on their schedule. Even if Lucy stuck around, Doris had proven she could draw an audience. They pursued her for a weekly series and despite Melcher's urging, she said no. She was a movie star, she argued, and couldn't handle the rapid pace of TV filming. Melcher argued back that her kind of movie (i.e., clean) was on its way out and the CBS deal was a lifeline. When she continued to say no, Melcher just ignored her wishes. Without telling her, he committed her to a sitcom and took a huge advance from the network. That money went directly into the Rosenthal investment program, never to be seen again.
Then Melcher got sick…very sick. He died in April of '68 and one day not long after, Doris ventured into his office to tidy up. There, she came across several completed scripts for a TV series called, chillingly, The Doris Day Show. CBS, she soon discovered, expected her to begin filming the show the following month. Further investigation yielded the horrifying revelation that her investments were not worth the millions of dollars Melcher had claimed. They were practically worthless and she was very close to bankruptcy. Somehow — despite depression over her husband's death and the subsequent disclosures, plus the fact that she hated the format of the series to which he'd committed her — she got through the filming of Season One of a TV series she didn't want to do. Those are the episodes that comprise this first DVD set.
The show lasted five seasons and went through four distinct formats and a wide selection of co-stars. Friends said it was amazing that she got through it at all. To further complicate her life during this period, her son Terry Melcher was mixed up with Charles Manson, plus there was a grueling lawsuit against Jerome Rosenthal. (Day eventually won a $22.8 million malpractice suit against him but settled for $6 million.) After the series was over with, she pretty much retired. A producer I know spent something like ten years offering her scripts and huge sums of money but she declined every one of them.
Like I said, I'm not recommending the show. Despite a good cast and the enduring charm of its star, it was a bland little comedy that is largely forgotten…so I guess, just for the sake of history, it's good that it's coming out now on DVD. At the very least, it gives me the chance to tell this story, which I find much more colorful than the show itself.