I Am Obsessed With “Make Room For Daddy”

Everyone else is binging series on Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, etc etc. I’m binging “Make Room For Daddy”. (Later retitled “The Danny Thomas Show.”) Except it’s not really binge-viewing, because the channel I get it on only airs two episodes a week, every Monday morning at 3:00am. (I DVR it and watch it when I get home from Radio City.)

I first saw “Make Room For Daddy” on Nick at Nite:

At the time I did not realize that I was only seeing 5 of the show’s 11(!) seasons. You see, the original “Make Room For Daddy” starred Danny Thomas and Jean Hagen. (Hagen was marvelous in “Singin’ In The Rain”.)

After three seasons playing second fiddle to Danny Thomas and the two kids, Hagen quit the series. Thus was born a television first: The first death of a major character in a sitcom! (Off-screen of course.)

There was a 4th season where Danny Williams (the Daddy in the title, played by Thomas) dated around and eventually found a new love in Kathy, played by Marjorie Lord. At the end of this season ABC cancelled the show–but CBS picked it up as a replacement for “I Love Lucy” which had just wrapped up its run.

The Nick at Nite years, seasons 5 through 9, featured Danny, Kathy, Rusty, Terry and Kathy’s daughter Linda from a previous marriage. Although reruns of the seasons with the first wife aired on NBC Daytime for quite a few years in the 60’s, they were never put into local syndication. So they just sort of disappeared, except for public domain video releases which are as sloppy and choppy as public domain videos generally tend to be.

But that’s okay, because the show was a very well-done but basic multi-camera family sitcom in those earliest years. It’s later on that, for me anyway, things get crazy interesting. It’s that fascinating examination of what sitcoms do to keep things interesting during a long, long run:

Guest Stars! This show had them all–Hope, Benny, Berle, Dinah Shore, and dozens more. Danny’s job as a nightclub comedian offered easy story opportunities for most of these guest shots. One of my favorites has Danny P.O.’ed that Jack Benny gets all the good TV hosting gigs; Danny lies down to get his mind off it and dreams that Benny is an agent of Satan. No…no, really. It’s brilliant.

Reocurring Characters! Annette Funnicello shows up for half a season or so as an Italian foreign exchange student; Pat Harrington Jr. (“Schneider” of One Day At A Time) shows up for half a season or so to woo Danny’s oldest girl; they get married, run off and are never heard from again. Bill Dana makes almost bi-weekly appearances in later seasons as Jose Jiminez. (I saw Bill Dana in person at an old-time radio convention in New Jersey several years ago!) And of course, at least 3 or 4 times a season there’s Uncle Tonoose, played by the brilliant Hans Conreid:

Backdoor Pilots! “Danny Thomas Show” episodes served as pilots for “The Andy Griffith Show”, “The Joey Bishop Show” and “The Bill Dana Show.”

Okay, so the Nick at Nite episodes are probably the best of the lot (I still remember being in the hospital with pneumonia in 1989, turning on Nick at Nite, and seeing the episode where Danny and Kathy and the kids are in Vegas for a honeymoon–the earliest episode in the N@N rerun package!)

But the real craziness happens in the final two seasons. These seasons, which were not part of the Nick at Nite package, have just started airing in the last couple of years on Cozi TV, a channel we just got here on cable. You see, by the end of season 9, Danny Thomas and Marjorie Lord decided they didn’t want to do full seasons of the series anymore. So here’s what happened: the characters of Danny and Kathy spent season 10 on a world tour, and they filmed, like 8 episodes in Europe. These episodes are done single-camera, no live audience, and are like mini-movies–still very sitcommy plots but lots of location filming and locally-based actors. It’s pretty marvelous. The other 22 or so episodes that season featured these two:

Charley, played by Sid Melton, had been on the show for a few seasons as Danny’s friend and boss at the nightclub where Danny performed. Bunny, played by Pat Carroll, had been introduced in the last season or two as a love interest for Charley. The characters married and had a baby who, in typical sitcom fashion, shows up about once every 12 episodes.

So while Danny and Kathy spent a full year in Europe, Charley and Bunny lived in their apartment and watched their kids. As one does. (It bears noting at this point that little Rusty was by now nearly 18, and probably could have watched the house himself.)

So this season of “The Danny Thomas Show” had Danny Thomas in the show less than a third of the season, and handed off the rest of the episodes to two secondary characters and the two kids, who by now were no longer “TV kid cute.” And it was the #7 show in America that year. This is what used to happen when you only had three channels.

My season pass is at the start of the 11th season, and from looking at an episode guide it appears Danny and Kathy are in most of the episodes…as are Charley and Bunny (after all, you can’t ask them to house-sit your network sitcom for a year then kick them to the curb). It also looks like they stole a page from the “I Love Lucy” playbook: The Williamses and the Halpers are moving to the country. This should be interesting…