Antenna TV has started airing reruns of The Joey Bishop Show, the sitcom in which Mr. Bishop starred from 1961 until 1965. The show had a checkered run during its four seasons but there was a period in there when it was pretty good. I was never fond of Joey as a comedian but even I like some of them.
The series started life as an episode of The Danny Thomas Show (aka Make Room for Daddy) on CBS. Several shows, like The Andy Griffith Show and The Bill Dana Show, began that way with their pilots disguised as episodes of Danny's series. In the disguised pilot, Bishop played Joey Mason, a Hollywood public relations man. CBS passed on the show and it wound up on NBC, changed quite a bit from what was intended in the pilot. For one thing, Bishop's character was now named Joey Barnes.
The show struggled through its first season and was almost canceled…but NBC decided to give it another chance on the condition that it undergo major surgery. And so Joey Barnes the Hollywood P.R. man became the host of a late night talk show and he got a new wife (played by the stunning Abby Dalton) and supporting cast that included Guy Marks, Mary Treen and Joe Besser. This version was pretty good and there was a third season on NBC, then NBC dropped it and it did a fourth season back on CBS. It was canceled in 1965 and two years later, life imitated art and Bishop became the host of a late night talk show for real…on ABC.
There are some odd things about the show. They loaded it down with guest stars and as I recall, the best episodes were the ones not built around a guest star. The first and last seasons were in black-and-white and the second and third were in color. An awful lot of the writers and non-regular actors on it also turned up on The Dick Van Dyke Show, which was filmed on the same lot. And some of the problems that the writers had with Joey off-stage turned up on the Van Dyke program as problems Rob, Buddy and Sally had with Alan Brady.
There was also one "lost" episode. Comedian Vaughn Meader, who was then famous for his impersonation of John F. Kennedy, filmed an episode full of J.F.K. jokes a week or so before Kennedy was murdered. It never aired. I doubt Antenna TV has it but I'll be watching to see if it turns up. It would be about a third of the way through Season 3.
Antenna TV has started airing with the second season, which was when the show started to get good. They have two episodes on each morning Monday through Friday and two episodes each evening on the weekends — so that's fourteen a week. There were 123 in all. Frankly, I don't think I can take that much Joey Bishop but we all might enjoy an occasional dose.