1965 Top TV Shows Included a Jeannie, Spies, War Buffoons & Farm Animals?

At the midpoint of the turbulent 1960s, with the Vietnam War escalating and the Civil Rights Movement galvanized by the march from Selma and the riots in Watts, the comfort zone provided by television became a much more colorful medium.

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1965 was a watershed year for broadcasting in color, with NBC (and its majestic peacock logo) trumpeting a nearly all-living-color fall lineup, and CBS and ABC adding more hues to their schedules, aiming for full color by the following year. By the end of 1965, NBC’s pioneering Today show and NBC’s nightly news The Huntley-Brinkley Report were shown in color, CBS aired the first color telecast of an NFL football game on Thanksgiving Day, and even live events including Pope Paul VI’s Mass in Yankee Stadium were made available in color.
The shows we watched were often just as vivid, in what TV Guide Magazine described in the annual Fall Preview issue as “a week-in, week-out schedule of pure escape.”
Quirky shows were all the rage
Though initially broadcast in black and white for budget reasons because of their special effects, two breakthrough 1965 shows reflected our fascination with space. (NASA’s manned Gemini program achieved several milestones that year.) Lost in Space introduced the Space (not Swiss) Family Robinson, who were explorers aboard the Jupiter 2 spaceship who got knocked off course by the villainous stowaway Dr. Smith (a cackling Jonathan Harris). The campy conniver was often the catalyst for interstellar mayhem that inevitably led The Robot to warn “Danger, Will Robinson!” anytime the youngest passenger (Bill Mumy), a surrogate for the show’s grade-school audience, was put in peril’s way.

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An astronaut, albeit mostly grounded on Earth, was the “I” in I Dream of Jeannie, a fanciful variation on Bewitched, which had premiered a year earlier amid a wave of lighthearted supernatural sitcoms. Like the viewer, Capt. (later Maj.) Tony Nelson (played by future Dallas superstar Larry Hagman) is beguiled by the effervescent and alluring genie named Jeannie (the delightful Barbara Eden) after finding her bottle on a deserted South Pacific isle.

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While fans of science fiction and magical misadventures enjoyed these great escapes, one historic turkey of a sitcom went too far in asking us to suspend our disbelief. NBC’s My Mother the Car, which somehow made it through a full 30-episode season, arrived just as talking horse Mister Ed was put to pasture. Ann Sothern, a vivacious comedian who had starred in her own TV sitcoms (Private Secretary and The Ann Sothern Show), gamely provided the voice of a classic 1928 Porter touring car that insisted she was the reincarnation of suburban family man Dave Crabtree’s (Jerry Van Dyke) late mother Gladys. TV Guide Magazine’s renowned critic Cleveland Amory dismissed the series as “one joke less than a one-joke show.”

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Almost as subversive in its own surreal way, occasionally breaking the proverbial “fourth wall” to react to background music and other TV conventions, Green Acres joined the CBS lineup of rural sitcoms as a companion to Petticoat Junction, also set in mythical, mirthful Hooterville. A reverse Beverly Hillbillies, the show starred Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor as transplanted Manhattanites Oliver Wendell Douglas and wife Lisa, big-city fish out of water as Oliver pursues his dream of becoming a gentleman farmer.
The reality could feel more like a bizarre nightmare, with the Douglases surrounded by such oddballs as their overeager farmhand Eb (Tom Lester), hapless carpenters Alf and Ralph (Sid Melton and Mary Grace Canfield), and the neighboring Ziffels, who treated their pet pig Arnold like a son. No one batted an eye as the precocious porker became something of a cult icon.
More successful were TV’s escapist spy exploits

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Riding the pop-culture coattails of the big screen’s James Bond, I Spy played it mostly straight but oh-so-cool, making history as the first network drama to feature a Black actor in a lead role. A pre-scandal Bill Cosby won three consecutive Emmys for his TV acting debut as Alexander “Scotty” Scott, part of a dashing undercover team with Robert Culp’s Kelly Robinson, posing as tennis bums as they jetted around the world on their missions.
Would you believe that a spy spoof from Mel Brooks and Buck Henry would be just as popular? Get Smart, which premiered the same week in September 1965, was an uproarious and whip-smart genre parody, starring the unflappable Don Adams as bumbling CONTROL Agent 86 Maxwell Smart. He was paired with the unbelievably glamorous Agent 99 (Barbara Feldon), who lovingly and regularly saved his bacon and reputation, becoming his bride in the fourth season. Recurring sight gags prevailed, most memorably Max’s improbable shoe phone.

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Brooks saw Get Smart as an irreverent antidote to TV’s epidemic of tame domestic sitcoms. “I wanted to do a crazy, unreal, comic-strip kind of thing about something besides a family,” he told Time magazine. “No one had ever done a show about an idiot before. I decided to be the first.”
Life during wartime became comedies?

Everett Collection; John Banner, Bob Crane, Werner Klemperer
A Nazi Germany POW camp was an even more unlikely setting for weekly comedy in Hogan’s Heroes, turning a World War II Stalag 17 premise into a con-man farce. Bob Crane starred as sly Col. Robert E. Hogan, who with his wily fellow prisoners continually outsmarted their captors, led by the irritable Col. Klink (Werner Klemperer) and the befuddled Sgt. Schultz (John Banner), with his “I see nothing, I hear nothing!” catchphrase.
Ironically, both Klemperer and Banner were Jewish, and Klemperer, who won two supporting-actor Emmys for the role, told producers he would leave the show if an episode ever made Klink seem heroic. One of Hogan’s associates, French Cpl. Louis LeBeau, was played by Robert Clary, a concentration camp survivor.

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Reaching further back into history for military mirth, F Troop took place in the post-Civil War 1800s at Fort Courage, a U.S. Army outpost in the remote Wild West, where the misfit soldiers wheeling and dealing with goofy local Indians (none played by Native Americans) owed a debt to Phil Silvers’ more contemporary Sgt. Bilko.
Westerns were still riding high

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Traditional Western dramas were still in vogue, with at least a dozen carrying on the tradition. And while several of 1965’s new entries faded quickly — Rod Serling’s The Loner, A Man Called Shenandoah (Wagon Train’s Robert Horton as an amnesiac), The Legend of Jesse James — ABC’s The Big Valley boasted Hollywood star power in the legendary “Miss Barbara Stanwyck,” who won an Emmy as the formidable ranching matriarch Victoria Barkley. Offspring included future Six Million Dollar Man Lee Majors as the illegitimate Heath and Dynasty’s Linda Evans as daughter Audra.

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But no Western provided more escapism than The Wild Wild West, a stylish hybrid that included elements of James Bondian spy action and H.G. Wells-worthy steampunk science fiction. A very fit Robert Conrad, often doing his own stunts in tight trousers, starred as Secret Service agent James West, with master of disguise Artemus Gordon (Ross Martin) along for the wild ride as they saved President Ulysses S. Grant’s America from fiendish archvillains, none more memorable than Michael Dunn’s megalomaniacal Dr. Loveless.
Julie Andrews and the Beatles ruled the music waves
For music lovers, the Beatles made their final historic appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show with a taped performance including songs from Help! (The Beatles animated show began airing on Saturday mornings.) Barbra Streisand, then primarily a Broadway star, was introduced to a much wider audience with her first solo TV special, the Emmy-winning My Name Is Barbra. Already an international celebrity thanks to Mary Poppins and that year’s blockbuster The Sound of Music, Julie Andrews also appeared in her first TV variety special, joined by Gene Kelly.
The Best of Children’s TV

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A remake of Andrews’ earlier live-TV hit, Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella starred Lesley Ann Warren, with Celeste Holm as the Fairy Godmother and Hollywood royalty Walter Pidgeon and Ginger Rogers as the king and queen. Unlike the original, this version was replayed on TV for years.
Children’s TV was briefly marred on New Year’s Day 1965 when pie-in-the-face comedian Soupy Sales asked kids watching his New York-based Lunch With Soupy Sales to send him money from their parents’ pants pockets as a prank, but when they actually did, he was suspended for two weeks.

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As 1965 ended, kids of all ages were enraptured by the year’s most enduring classic: A Charlie Brown Christmas, the first Peanuts special, an underdog’s perspective on “what Christmas is all about” with actual children’s voices, enhanced by Vince Guaraldi’s infectious and innovative jazz score.
Rewatching something this timeless every holiday season is the best sort of escape. Unlike those (like me) who’ll never forget seeing that first broadcast, it never gets old.

1965
February 2025
Flashback to 1965 and celebrate the very best of TV, Movies, Music, Fashion & more!
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