Posted 6:20 PM by Gene

After posting on Laura's suck-up this morning I was depressed to realize practically everyone associated with the TV Bewitched is dead.* (You want gloom? Read this page about Dick York.) Now comes word that an icon of godawful sitcoms, the veteran trouper Eddie Albert, has died, and that means next to no one's left from Green Acres either. (Eva Gabor, for instance, died in 1995.) As genuinely, mortifyingly BAD as Filmways's sitcoms were -- indeed their supreme BADNESS helped inspire the never-ending show-biz disaster that followed -- we can't help mourning, as with the likely end of the Star Trek franchise. Despite their aggressively awful situations and "jokes" and their non-stop laugh tracks (and was ever any TV star more exasperating than Pat Buttram?) they defined, for better or worse (mostly worse) the growing up of millions, and however dreadful Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction and The Addams Family were, the highly-polished worse that takes their place is nothing.

*Bewitched's initial sponsor was Chevrolet, and it's still around, but then GM hasn't felt too well lately.