ABC years
The show began on ABC in black-and-white. The first season, consisting of 36 episodes, was directed in its entirety by Peter Tewksbury, the Emmy-winning director of Father Knows Best , who produced and occasionally scripted the programs. [3]
During the 1964 fall season, William Frawley, who played Bub, was declared too ill to work by Desilu Studios, as the company was informed that insuring the actor would be too costly. Frawley continued in the role until a suitable replacement could be found at midseason. He was replaced by William Demarest, who played his hard-nosed brother (great) Uncle Charley, introduced partway through the 1964–1965 season (the last on ABC). According to the storyline, Bub returns to Ireland to help his Aunt Kate celebrate her 104th birthday. Soon after, brother Charley visits and stays on. Charley, a cello-playing merchant sailor, was a soft-hearted curmudgeon, who proved to be a responsible caregiver. Frawley left the series before the end of the 1964–1965 season. He died March 3, 1966. [4]
The address of the fictional home in Bryant Park was 837 Mill Street. The actual address of the home used for the Bryant Park episodes was 837 5th Avenue in Los Angeles California. Many of the 1960s My Three Sons external shoots were actually done on location on 5th Avenue.
CBS years
My Three Sons moved to the CBS television network for the 1965–1966 season after ABC declined to underwrite the expense of producing the program in color. Along with the change in networks and the transition to color, Tim Considine (who had earlier worked with Fred MacMurray on The Shaggy Dog ), playing eldest son Mike, had chosen not to renew his contract due to a clash with executive producer Don Fedderson over Considine's wish to direct but not co-star in the series. (Considine did, however, direct one of the last black-and-white episodes for ABC.) In an August 1989 interview on the Pat Sajak Show , he explained that he was also devoted to car racing, which his contract forbade. His character was written out, along with Meredith MacRae, who had played his fiancée Sally, in a wedding episode that was the premiere of the 1965–1966 season on CBS. After this episode, Mike is mentioned briefly in only four succeeding episodes (including the one in which the family adopts Ernie) and is never seen again, even at Robbie's or Steve's weddings. (Steve explains briefly in one of these episodes that he has another son who "lives away from home".) In the episode "Steve and the Huntress" (first aired January 27, 1966), Mike is specifically mentioned as teaching at a college. MacRae joined Petticoat Junction the following year, the last of three actresses to play Billie Jo Bradley.
To keep the show's title plausible, the show's head writer, George Tibbles, fashioned a three-part story arc in which an orphaned friend of youngest brother Richard (Chip, played by Stanley Livingston), Ernie Thompson (played by his real-life brother, Barry Livingston), awaits adoption when his current foster parents are transferred to the Orient. Steve offers to adopt Ernie, but faces antagonism from Uncle Charley, who finds Ernie a bit grating and forecasts major headaches over both the boy and his dog. It also transpires that a law requires a woman to live in the home of an adoptive family. A likable female social worker supervises the case and the Douglases speculate that Steve might marry the woman to make the adoption possible, but they agree that this is not reason enough for them to be married. Also, the family has no need for a housekeeper; Uncle Charley already has things running smoothly. The family soon appears before a judge who researches the law and determines that its intent is to ensure that a full-time caregiver is in the household. As Charley meets that role and has had a change of heart about Ernie, he assents to a legal fiction that declares him the Douglas family's "housemother". [6]
While the three sons were always central to the storyline, several major changes took place by the late 1960s. In the spring of 1967, the series' ratings began to sag, and it finished its seventh season in 31st place in the Nielsen ratings. It was decided that the 1967–1968 season would bring the program not only a new time slot but also new storylines to spice up the ratings. In the fall of 1967, CBS moved My Three Sons to Saturday at 8:30 pm ET. In the season premiere episode, "Moving Day", the Douglas family and Uncle Charley relocate from the fictional Midwestern town of Bryant Park to Los Angeles, California. Robbie (Don Grady) marries his girlfriend Katie Miller. Katie is played by Tina Cole, who had appeared in different roles on three previous episodes: "House For Sale" from the fourth season (February 13, 1964), "The Coffee House Set" from the fifth season (November 19, 1964), and "Robbie and the Little Stranger" from the sixth season (February 17, 1966). At the end of the 1967–1968 season, the ratings had improved from the previous year with the series placing at 24th in the Nielsens. The following season, the newlyweds discover that Katie is pregnant and she gives birth to triplets named Robert, Steven, and Charles. Originally played by sets of uncredited twins, the boys were later played uncredited by Guy, Gunnar, and Garth Swanson; and in the last two seasons by Michael, Daniel, and Joseph Todd.
The following year in the 10th season, 1969–1970, Steve remarries. His new bride, widowed teacher Barbara Harper (Beverly Garland), brings with her a five-year-old daughter, Dorothy "Dodie" (Dawn Lyn), whom Steve adopts. Dodie is wary of Steve at first, believing that he wants her to just forget her late father, but he explains that he wants her to always remember and love him, but since he's no longer alive, Steve wants to raise her in his place and he hopes she'll come to love him, too. The series' last year and a half feature fewer appearances from both Don Grady and Stanley Livingston. Grady's character was written out at the end of the 11th season, which allowed for his wife Katie and their triplet sons to remain in the Douglas household for the following season (as a structural engineer Robbie was working on a bridge construction in Peru). Meanwhile, Chip and his teenage wife Polly (Ronne Troup), who had eloped after Polly's disciplinarian father refused to sanction their marriage, move into their own apartment.
At the end of the 1970–1971 season, the show's 11th year, My Three Sons was still garnering healthy ratings. By the spring of 1971, it had finished in 19th place. A 1971 television pilot with Don Grady and Tina Cole called Three of a Kind, then retitled Robbie—about Robbie, Katie, and the triplets moving to San Francisco—was filmed but not picked up as a series. [7] The final episode of the 1970–1971 season, "After the Honeymoon", actually set up the premise for this pilot. Richard X. Slattery and Pat Carroll guest-starred as the landlords of the apartment block into which Robbie and Katie move. However, Don Grady had informed the producers of his intention to leave the series and pursue a new full-time career as a composer, which he ultimately did.
For the series' 12th and, ultimately, final season, CBS moved the show to Mondays at 10:00 pm ET. In addition to the time changes for the 12th season, a new four-part story arc is introduced with MacMurray in a second role, that of his cousin, the Laird (Lord) Fergus McBain Douglas of Sithian Bridge; English actor Alan Caillou's voice was dubbed over MacMurray's. The plot centers on Lord Douglas's arrival in Los Angeles from the family's native Scotland, in search of a bride to take back to Scotland with him.
He finds Terri Dowling (Anne Francis), a waitress at the Blue Berry Bowling Alley. While initially reluctant to give up her life in America and return to Scotland as nobility, she finally accepts. This storyline continues a plot idea that originally began in the fourth season, when the Douglases visited Scotland on the pretense of having been told they had inherited a castle in the Highlands. [8]
With a later time slot, the show finished the season outside the top 30. To save the series, CBS moved it in midseason back to Thursdays at 8:30 pm ET, its old time slot. Nevertheless, My Three Sons ended its primetime run in the spring of 1972 after 12 years on the air. CBS also aired daytime reruns starting in December 1971 (only the CBS color shows), for about one season, first airing at 10:30 a.m., and then moving to 4:00 p.m. in June 1972.
