For most of the history of television, the barrier to syndication—and to profitability—has been 100 episodes. The shows that have made it to that mark are an unusual group. Many were big hits. Some found small cult audiences. Still others just hung on as best they could and never posted numbers quite low enough to be canceled. In 100 Episodes, we examine the shows that made it to that number, considering both how they advanced and reflected the medium and what contributed to their popularity. This entry covers Mister Ed, which ran for six seasons and 143 episodes in syndication and on CBS between 1961 and 1966.
In the 1950s and ’60s, Americans started leaving the city for the country, and television followed suit. The medium served as a new homestead for the likes of The Lone Ranger and Gene Autry from its earliest days, but the “adult Western” double whammy of Gunsmoke and The Life And Legend Of Wyatt Earp gave TV its first real taste of manifest destiny. The year those shows debuted, a cowboy couldn’t crack the Nielsen Top 30. Five years later, at the start of the new decade, four of the five most popular shows in the United States were horse operas.
The fifth of those shows would signal the next phase in TV’s rural exodus. Led by the folksy talent who stormed onto the big screen in Elia Kazan’s A Face In The Crowd, The Andy Griffith Show made primetime fixtures out of backwater burgs like Mayberry, North Carolina. Itself a spin-off of another juggernaut from Desilu Productions, The Danny Thomas Show, the expanding boundaries of Andy Griffith’s fictional setting eventually established a pastoral empire for its studio, encompassing Mayberry R.F.D. and the offsite military exploits of Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. Meanwhile, rival independent production outfit Filmways was firing up its own assembly line of exurban comedies, introducing (in succession) Mister Ed, The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, and Green Acres. Though they curried little favor with Emmy voters—who were, at the very least, smitten with Don Knotts’ portrayal of bumbling Mayberry deputy Barney Fife—Andy Griffith and The Beverly Hillbillies went on to become the two biggest sitcoms of the decade, building a reputation for homespun comedy on CBS that earned the network a tongue-in-cheek sobriquet: The Country Broadcasting System.
United by a sense of place, Desilu’s and Filmways’ rural comedies diverged in their senses of humor. While Sheriff Andy Taylor and his country kin played things earnest and grounded, the Filmways house style was more surreal—and none of those shows was as surreal as Mister Ed. Green Acres came close, but by then, Batman had made self-aware camp all the rage. In putting a straight face on the weekly adventures of an architect (Alan Young) and his talking horse (the gelding Bamboo Harvester, voiced by character actor Allan “Rocky” Lane), Mister Ed blended Mayberry earnestness with Filmways’ flair for the bizarre. It’s one thing to have a smaller animal like Green Acres’ Arnold Ziffel traipsing through a scene, but it’s quite another to have a great, muscular beast like Bamboo Harvester at the center of a series. Adding to the series’ surreal look, Ed had a full wardrobe of novelty-sized hats and glasses; in “Leo Durocher Meets Mister Ed,” the show produced one of the strangest visual gags in TV history when “Ed” “slides” into home plate at Dodger Stadium. Viewed one way, it’s just a chintzy effect in a series that’s usually more careful about that kind of thing. Viewed another way: It appears that the producers, having given up on beating a dead horse, are now dragging its carcass down the third-base line.
When Wilbur Post (Young) and his blushing bride Carol (Connie Hines) move in to the house at 17230 Valley Spring, the country chic of the era is splashed all over the living room. The front doors have the diagonal bracing of a barn entrance, and a repurposed barrel serves as an end table in the living room. But like the midcentury modern fixtures mixed in to the Posts’ rural getaway, Mister Ed existed at the intersection of two prevailing ’60s trends. Similar to The Beverly Hillbillies, Mister Ed debuted at the dawn of the high-concept sitcom, a gimmick-happy era where comedies weren’t just looking to the farm for inspiration—they were gazing at the stars and paging through storybooks, too. A format born in realistic, domestic spaces like the ones depicted on I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, Mama, and The Goldbergs was brought to fanciful new heights through advances in filming and editing techniques, allowing for the high-stakes spy-movie hijinks of Get Smart, the super-powered house guests of I Dream Of Jeannie and My Favorite Martian, or the castaway crises of Gilligan’s Island. At their best, high concept sitcoms wound their gimmicks around the frameworks of a less-involved production, like Bewitched, the story of two newlyweds—one of whom happens to be a witch. At their worst, they’re kitschy, ready-made punchlines, like My Mother The Car or The Flying Nun.
“Audiences want something that isn’t dull,’’ Bewitched and My Favorite Martian veteran Alan Rafkin told The New York Times in 2000. “And those shows couldn’t be dull because their concepts wouldn’t allow them to be dull.” In a sales pitch attached to the Mister Ed’s original pilot, George Burns echoes Rafkin’s statement. “The basic problem of any weekly series is your script,” said the comedian, who, in addition to financially backing the production, also supervised its writing. “After about the ninth or the tenth week, the writers get a little tired, and they can’t think of new situations and fresh ideas. But with a talking horse listening to what’s going on around the neighborhood, this is an impossibility. Storylines are endless. In fact, the writers that are going to be signed for this show should pay us.”
Somewhere between the wicked smarts of Bewitched and the running-on-empty premise of My Mother The Car, there’s Mister Ed. (Though it’s worth noting that in television, even the most creatively bankrupt concept can forge some major talents: My Mother The Car is the show that brought together the creators of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Allan Burns and James L. Brooks.) Essentially a TV adaptation of Arthur Lubin’s Francis The Talking Mule franchise, the series reinvents a premise laid out in a series of short stories by Walter R. Brooks: Milquetoast architect Wilbur Post (“Wilbur Pope” in Brooks’ stories) finds himself the owner and lone confidant of a mischievous talking horse named Ed. As had happened with Max Shulman’s Dobie Gillis stories when they were brought to CBS, Lubin would have to do some sanitizing to get Ed ready for primetime. On the page, Wilbur and Ed are carousing drunks, their walkabouts often spurred by the cocktail parties thrown by Wilbur’s socialite wife, Carlotta. Ed’s trickster streak survived the translation to the screen, but the booze and the bawdiness were pitched for milder family-hour fare. On TV, Ed’s habits never got nastier than eavesdropping on telephone conversations.
The networks, however, balked at the show’s creaky, unfunny pilot. Sponsors were reluctant to sign on as well, until the agency representing the series drafted on a bit of pioneer spirit. Having booked the role of Wilbur following a complete, post-pilot overhaul (Lubin and company replaced everything but the horse’s voice), Alan Young was sent on a barnstorming mission to sell Studebaker dealers on the idea of sponsoring what was originally titled Wilbur Pope And Mister Ed. The new casting came down to a personal recommendation from Burns: As Young would later tell it, the cigar-chomping co-star of The George Burns And Gracie Allen Show said, “I think we should get Alan Young because he looks like the sort of guy a horse would talk to.” Enough of the car peddlers agreed, and they put up the money to syndicate the first year of Mister Ed. When the Studebaker money ran out, CBS stepped in, seeking a series to pair with Lassie. The network would have its pony show and its dog show leading into Ed Sullivan’s powerhouse dog-and-pony show on Sunday nights.