This show was one of my all time favorites and one of the best shows ever. Of course, like a number of past shows on the big three networks, it was rewarded for its excellence by cancellation. This show was a wonderful portrait of mid American life in the post world War 2 period. Not a single performance hit a false note, and the scripts captured all of the social changes and cultural trends of the time. I still remember one episode about labor-management conflict. There was a fascinating montage at the end, showing a meeting of managers and business owners in one room and of labor organizers in the other. In each room, there is just one woman present-to serve coffee. Let me speak frankly. It has been said before, but the collective intelligence of most TV programmers and executives is roughly equivalent to that of gnats. A whole TV network could be fashioned just out of brilliant, but canceled shows. The Westerner, Slatterys People,Channing, My Wotld and Welcome To it, The John Larouquette Show, Nichols, East Side West Side, the Rogues, I'll Fly Away,The Adventures of Briscoe County Junior, T.H.E. Cat, and this- and that is only the tip of the iceberg. Sometimes, I think TV is a device to make us dumb,and that whenever a good show briefly slips through the cracks, and actually tries to , God help us, provoke thought, it is rapidly canceled, unless the writers come up with a clever enough gimmick, like a mysterious Island, or a suburban Mafia family, or a father and son team of defense attorneys. Ah, there are a half million stories from the annals of network stupidity, and this was one of them.
