The Girl with Something Extra

21 of the 22 episodes of NBC's The Girl With Something Extra were rerun this year on Get TV. I was unfamiliar with this series during it's original run, having watched its competition, Roll Out on CBS, and The Odd Couple on abc. The Girl With Something Extra works very well as a light comedy, without getting bogged down in the magic of E.S.P., and like Sally Field's earlier Screen Gems series, Gidget, and The Flying Nun, her supporting cast is excellent. I was pleasantly surprised and would love to see a complete series DVD, if only to see the missing episode.

This was a fun show that deserved to be more popular. Not as magical as "Bewitched" or "I Dream of Jeannie," and not as silly as "The Flying Nun," Sally Field played a girl with ESP...think "Nanny and the Professor". I would love to see this again.

I saw this show during its first run, and likely has not been on the air since it was canceled, so the recent rebroadcast of the series is a nice trip down memory lane – but only to discover how incredibly boring a show it was.

The Girl With Something Extra is a late entry in the "magical person in a real world" scenario that infected the television landscape in the 1960s and 1970s. My Favorite Martian, Bewitched, and I Dream of Jeannie are the better examples, but other efforts include Living Doll, Nanny and the Professor, The Smothers Brothers Show (the sit-com where Tom was an Angel) The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and Sally Field's first post-Giget series, The Flying Nun.

Unfortunately, there is little going in the series. Frankly, for a show about someone who can read minds, the show is a talk-fest. The pilot, except for one brief scene between Davidson and Jack Sheldon, was in its entirely a series of two-person scenes between Field and Davidson. The approach was more akin to a two-act off-off Broadway production than a sit-com.

The gimmick here, ESP, is most of the time entirely superfluous. It seldom drives or resolves story lines and in many episodes is not needed at all. Indeed, the plots could be used in almost any series without a "magical" device. The use of ESP is perhaps one of the worst magical gimmicks to use. It is a passive ability and not used to set up slapstick or farcical scenes, which are the stock and trade of these sorts of sit-coms.

There is an attempt to integrate on-location shooting in the production, which does improve the series overall look. Effort is often made to put Field in a pair of short-shorts or bikini (Thank You BTW), and Davidson is probably the first husband on TV to be shown sleeping in bed bare-chested, but such diversions were not enough to keep the series going.

With wispy scenes of walking on the beach and the focus on a young couple working out their newlywed problems, the series has a post-Love Story focus on romance that may have been appealing at some level, but was overall a drag on the sit-com premise. If the show debuted in the 1960s, it might have squeaked out two seasons, but as it was, by 1973 the magical person sit-com was long past it's due date, and it shows.

I think that Sally Field, John Davidson and Jack Sheldon should be the first three names listed. They were the stars of the show. I think that having the three stars names at the bottom of the cast list is an insult to the three of them,. I think that IMDb.com should correct this error immediately. I also fondly recall watching this delightful show when I was growing up. There was an episode at Christmas time that was based on O. Henry's Gift of The Magi. I'm hoping that this show is put out on DVD or shown on TVLand. This is the kind of show that would fit into TVLand's line-up. I think that I will e-mail them and ask them about putting this show in their line-up.

Being able hear people's thoughts and exploring the dilemma between what they ask for and what they really want, could have propelled this show to the iconic status of other fantasy sitcoms of those days. Could we imagine just how many opportunities that Sally could have had in helping her lawyer husband with his cases or fulfilling customer's wishes in her antique store or with the overall struggles of the feminist movement of the early 1970s?

This show doesn't make good use of its premise, being uncreative and flat in a world full of possibilities. Just for comparison, take the commercial success of the imaginative writing of a similar premise in the funny (and somewhat thought provoking) Ce que veulent les femmes (2000), where the ESP 'gift' is presented from the man's perspective.

Unfortunately, 'The Girl with Something Extra' doesn't really get anywhere and ended up wasting the talents of two good actors, who could have made better material really work.