Whatever Happened to Billy & Toby from ‘The Doris Day Show’?

THE DORIS DAY SHOW, Todd Starke, Philip Brown, 1968-73. — TV Guide/courtesy Everett Collection

What To Know

Billy and Toby, Doris Day’s on-screen sons in The Doris Day Show, disappeared without explanation after Season 3.
This abrupt cast change was part of a broader trend in early 1970s television to move away from rural comedies toward more urban, adult-oriented storylines.

If you remember The Doris Day Show, which ran from 1968 to 1973 on CBS, you probably remember one big thing about it: it was always changing. When The Doris Day Show first started in 1968, Doris Martin (Doris Day) was a widow with two boys: Billy (Philip Brown) and Toby (Todd Starke). They all lived with her father, Buck (Denver Pyle), on a ranch north of San Francisco. A lot of the show was about Doris raising her boys.

In Season 2, Doris started commuting to the city to work as a secretary at Today’s World magazine. And by Season 3, Doris, Billy, and Toby had packed everything up and moved into a city apartment right above an Italian restaurant. Throughout all the constant retooling, the boys remained a big part of the show.

However, what many people didn’t know way back then was that Day had been signed up for the program by her husband and manager, Martin Melcher, without her even knowing it. Right before he died in 1968, Melcher had let Beverly Hills lawyer Jerome Rosenthal mismanage and lose her entire savings, leaving her with a mountain of debt.

Writing for Forbes, Rachel Sandler quoted Day as saying, “My husband thought Rosenthal was a genius. I was working away, knowing nothing, and trusting.”

THE DORIS DAY SHOW, Todd Starke, Doris Day, Philip Brown, 1968-73

Everett Collection

Day’s financial situation is a big reason the producers kept trying new things. They kept trying to find a format that would transform a show that was doing okay in the ratings into a blockbuster hit.

The really confusing changes, though, came with Season 4. Suddenly, almost the entire supporting cast vanished. Doris’ father was gone, and so were her boys. For TV viewers tuning in, it really did feel like blissfully unaware Doris had been transferred into The Twilight Zone. However, in reality, the show was trying to be more like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, turning Doris into an independent, modern career woman.

Frustratingly, the show never explained what happened to Billy and Toby. Instead, they were simply never mentioned again. For fans who grew up watching the show, it was just kind of annoying. The kids were there, and then they weren’t.

Way back then, the networks really didn’t care much about continuity. You see, television was still a few years away from video cassette recorders and their ability to record TV shows, and CBS was just eager to forget everything that had transpired up until that fourth season. It has been well documented that they wanted to move away from rural comedies, a move that TV historians call the “rural purge”, and get to more adult, city storylines.

Here is what Day told TV columnist Norma Lee Browning in 1971: “I’ll miss all of them who won’t be back this year. You become attached to people after working together for years, but that’s the way it goes. And I’m very excited about the way the new show is going.”

Did you get that last part? She called it a new show. In her mind, this wasn’t a retooling of an existing program; this was a brand-new TV show. And were things better because of it? Well, that is a topic for another time. Instead, let’s tackle this question: What happened to the two young actors who played the sons?

THE DORIS DAY SHOW, Doris Day, 1968-73 (1972 photo)

Everett Collection

Todd Starke, who played younger son Toby, also appeared in the popular Andy Griffith movie, Angel in My Pocket. From everything documented after he was let go from The Doris Day Show, he was reportedly very disappointed. It seems that Starke was a bit of a sensitive lad, and after a bad experience like that one, and another while working on an episode of Adam-12, he decided to quit acting.

Sadly, Starke’s life was cut short. He was killed in a motorcycle accident on May 4, 1983. He was only 21 years old at the time. The news was heartbreaking for Day. She had actually warned both of her TV kids about the dangers of motorcycles. Her own son, Terry, had been in a terrible motorcycle accident that left him with shattered leg bones and required months in the hospital.

Philip Brown, who played older son Billy, found a much longer career in television. In the ’80s, viewers may have spotted him as TV sportscaster Steve Kendall on the daytime soap opera Search for Tomorrow. He could also be found on nighttime soaps as well, playing Neil Kittridge on the Dynasty spinoff The Colbys, and Brian Johnston on Knots Landing. Fans may remember that Brian was a bit of a psycho-stalker on that show. And in 1993, Brown returned to daytime television playing Buck Houston in Loving.

These days, Brown mostly works in commercials. He is reportedly happily married and gives interviews from time to time where he loves looking back on his entire career, as well as his time as one of Day’s television sons.

In a 2007 video interview that can be found on YouTube, here’s what Brown said it was like working with Day: “It felt like we were acting with someone who…was really our mother. And when we went to work, that’s how we treated it. I was her son for 12 hours a day, and that’s really how it felt.”