An archive of articles about US television programmes and production.
Nostalgia Corner: Tabatha/Tabitha (1977)
There were two big US fantasy sitcoms of the 1960s that took on board women’s changing roles in society, not by showing them at work but by showing them as more than just ‘mere’ housewives and people with ideas of their own: I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched.
I Dream of Jeannie saw Barbara Eden appear at first to be ‘every man’s dream’ – a sexy blonde genie with magic powers, willing to do whatever he commanded.
However, as a pre-JR Larry Hagman was about to discover, even slaves have minds of their own and Barbara Eden’s Jeannie very definitely had a will of her own, throwing Hagman’s life upside down – the star of the show was clearly Eden rather Hagman and Tony the astronaut spent most of his time keeping up with Jeannie, rather than the other way round.
Here’s a little minisode version of the first episode to give you an idea. Surprisingly, it was written by Sidney Sheldon (yes, the fabulously successful author).
Meanwhile in Bewitched, Elizabeth Montgomery played Samantha, an apparently normal young American woman, who meets and falls in love with a very normal American man Darrin (Dick York at first, then Dick Sargent). Except it turns out that Samantha is a witch and with just a wiggle of her nose, she can make more or less anything happen.
Samantha wants to be a normal housewife but somehow, usually thanks to the efforts of her mother Endora, she always ends up having to use her powers for some reason or other. And as with I Dream of Jeannie, this was a show very much about the female lead rather than the male lead, what she wanted, what she was prepared to do to fit in with society and more.
Here’s the pilot episode:
In both series, the set-ups evolved, with Jeannie eventually marrying Tony and having a family with him, and Samantha also having a daughter, Tabitha, and a son, Adam.
Five years after Bewitched ended in 1972, and we’re in a post-Rhoda world, where the single young, sexually liberated working woman is now a valid subject for a comedy. And although it was just five years later, Tabitha has apparently grown up into a young woman working in the LA television industry. Cue an ABC sitcom called Tabitha starring Knots Landing‘s Lisa Hartman and Robert Urich from Vega$ and Spenser: For Hire. Here’s the opening credits that explain everything.
