8 /10 1 Votes8
7.2/10 TV Country of origin United States First episode date 6 September 1967 Number of episodes 26 | 8.8/10 IMDb Genre Situation comedy Original language(s) English Final episode date 13 March 1968 Number of seasons 1 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Starring Richard BenjaminPaula PrentissJack CassidyHamilton CampKenneth Mars Cast Similar The Good Guys, Get Smart, Green Acres, The Governor & JJ, That Girl | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
He & She is an American sitcom that aired on the CBS television network as part of its 1967–1968 lineup, originally sponsored by General Foods and Lever Brothers.
He & She is widely considered by broadcast historians to have been ahead of its time. Its sophisticated approach to comedy was viewed as opening doors to the groundbreaking MTM family of sitcoms of the 1970s, beginning with The Mary Tyler Moore Show in 1970. The character of Oscar was openly the pattern for the Ted Baxter character, for which creator Leonard Stern granted permission.
CBS aired reruns of He & She in prime time from June to September 1970.
Synopsis
He & She stars real-life married couple Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss as Dick and Paula Hollister, a successful cartoonist and his wife, a social worker. Hollister's cartoon "Jetman" had in fact been so successful that it was now a network television series starring egomaniacal actor Oscar North (Jack Cassidy) as the titular Jetman. North constantly argues with Hollister over the interpretation and direction of the Jetman character. Folksinger-actor Hamilton Camp played the role of handyman Andrew Hummel at the apartment building where the starring characters lived, and Kenneth Mars played firefighter Harry Zarakartos, who would often drop in on the Hollisters' apartment by a plank connected to the firehouse across the street.
Writers Chris Hayward and Allan Burns, who created the series The Munsters, were hired by executive producer Leonard Stern (co-writer and producer of Get Smart) as story editors for He & She, for which they won the 1968 Emmy Award for comedy writing. The show received four other Emmy nominations that year, including nominations for Prentiss, Benjamin, and Cassidy. Burns would go on to be a writer and co-creator (among others) of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, of which He & She is considered a major forerunner. The show also earned three of the four Writers Guild nominations for Best Writing in a Comedy.
Despite the strong lead-in of Green Acres (a top-25 prime-time show that season), He & She was cancelled after one season, although selected episodes were later rerun as a summer replacement series by CBS in 1970. USA reran episodes and later in 1998 TV Land ran selected episodes of the series, but it has not been seen since then. Cast members, such as Richard Benjamin, felt that the Green Acres lead-in actually hurt the show because the two series were so different in their rural and urban approaches.
The series was also a pioneer in the portrayal of the working wife, which was not yet in vogue on television.