just watched an episode of the TV show, ‘The Danny Thomas Show’. It’s a late-season 10 episode, and the show is nearing the end of its run, with season 11 being the final season. You can tell that all the major players are burnt out and ready to move on. Danny Thomas and Marjorie Lord have checked out and, to minimize their involvement in the show, are said to be touring Europe. While a couple of the episodes feature the two of them, most of the episodes in Season 10 begin with them receiving either a letter or a phone call from a family member, which they read as an introduction to a problem occurring at home. From there, it transitions to the home front, and the rest of the show revolves around the other cast members solving the problem.
As a setup for this, they have their friends Charley Halper (Sid Melton) and his wife Bunny (Pat Carroll) babysitting the kids, so the stories mostly involve the two of them and the kids. A lot of the stories are decent, and Melton and Carroll do a good job filling in, but a lot of the stories are pretty bad. From what I can see, most of the original writers have moved on, which often happens when a show is close to ending because the writers want to beat the rush and land new jobs before they’re unemployed. This leaves a show in the hands of inexperienced writers or writers that are not top tier, which results in some pretty bad scripts. It also doesn’t help that after 10 seasons, most everything has been done already, and there’s not a lot of areas left to explore.
The show that I watched today was called ‘Tonoose Needs Glasses’. In it, Danny’s uncle Tonoose, played by Hans Conried, finds out he needs glasses but doesn’t want to get them because he feels it’s an indication of him getting old and feeble. Charley, Bunny and the kids decide that they must convince him to get glasses, and they do so by staging fake events that make it look like Tonoose is not seeing well. Where the script really fails is with the events. Rusty wears a tie that pops up, Charley wears a bow tie that flashes, Bunny wears a Groucho Marx nose, and Linda has a flower on her dress that switches back and forth between the left and right sides. Somehow, this convinces Tonoose that his eyesight is bad, and he goes into a state of depression and starts acting like an old, worn-out man. The reason this doesn’t work is because in real life, nobody would believe it, yet the lazy writers don’t care and go with it anyway. This type of episode is an insult to the intelligence of the viewers and yet is fairly common on TV. It’s too bad, when a show has run its course, it’s time to get off the stage.
I’ve still enjoyed most of ‘The Danny Thomas Show’ and it’s worth watching but just be aware that towards the end, the quality does suffer.
