Dream Wife

"Dream Wife" is a failed pilot episode for a TV series that never was bought by the networks. Despite the same name, it has no relationship with the Cary Grant film.

The show stars Shirley Jones as a wife who can read minds...yes, read minds. While this might sound kind of goofy, remember that the 1960s had a lot of shows with strange gimmicks....such as "I Dream of Jeanie", "Bewitched", "My Favorite Martian", "Mr. Ed", and "My Mother the Car".

While she does have ESP, there are two problems. Her friend, the Professor, is apparently the only one who knows the wife has ESP...and he strongly advises her not to tell her husband. The other is that she cannot control the ESP...and sometimes it leads her on kooky adventures and this doesn't help the marriage any. But it also CAN come in handy....as you'll see near the end of the show.

The first thing I noticed about the show, and it's a personal pet peeve, is the brashness and poor use of a laughtrack....a big strike against it. On the other hand, it was at times clever and well made. I particularly liked John Abbott playing an uncharacteristically funny role as well as Jones, who is a joy in pretty much everything. Sadly, however, Ted Bissell's supporting character is a mess and is easy to hate...thanks to the writing. He just could have been decent had the guy been subtle.

So is this a show that could have worked on TV? Probably. The silliness of the shows I mentioned above abounds...yet they were mostly very successful. And, while I wonder how the show could have maintained fun episodes after a while, the above shows somehow managed.

The bottom line is that I didn't love the show...but seeing it is interesting and it's not terrible.

If you know much of anything about Television sitcoms of the 1960s, you know that the bulk of them had some kind of supernatural gimmick. Two of the more popular shows of this type: "Bewitched" and "I Dream of Jeannie" were about a beautiful immortal woman, helping out (or attempting to help) a mortal man with magic.

Here things are a little more down to earth. In "Dream Wife," a pilot that didn't make any network's schedule, Shirley Jones was the titular character (who was called "Liza" by everyone in the cast who used her name, but was listed as "Lisa" in the show's credits), who helped her hubby Paul (Donald May) rise through the ranks in his job to become a junior partner in his firm as this episode gets going.

The secret is that the character has the ability to hear thoughts (as the audience can hear them as well, with an echo-like voiceover when she's mind-reading) and through that, she could steer and guide her spouse to make the right choices and have success.

Liza (I'm going with how the name was pronounced), was a mom to young Tommy (Kelly Corcoran) who knows Mom has ESP through their private interactions, and they keep that info away from Dad because Liza's good friend Professor De Pew (John Abbott) suggests that telling him would create even more trouble when he discovers he hasn't accomplished any of his business achievements on his own!

The trouble with the pilot is in the interactions between the characters, which, even for a sitcom, don't feel real at all. Reactions to misunderstandings, handling antagonists and generally reacting to information by all of the characters just feels stilted and unreal within the program's own context. I think if those were cleaned up and made more believable, this might have found a network.

But there were two sitcoms that eventually were created that played on this very same theme. The first was "Nanny and the Professor" (which also borrowed liberally from "Mary Poppins") about a child caretaker played by Juliet Mills, who seemed to have several sorts of powers as she helped her little family along, and "The Girl With Something Extra" with Sally Field as another character with the ability to read minds, only she confessed her skills to her husband after they got married.

"Dream Wife" is a unique curio in TV lore, even as it was trying to copy the current tropes of the mid-1960s programming schedule, and Ms. Jones is the best, if not the only reason to consider giving it a look.