The Patty Duke Show

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The Patty Duke Show was a sitcom which ran on ABC from September 18, 1963 to the final episode aired on May 4, 1966 and repeats through August 31, 1966. The show was created as a vehicle for rising star Patty Duke, who had recently won an Academy Award for The Miracle Worker.

Patty Lane (played by Duke) was a normal teenager living in the Brooklyn Heights section of New York City, who loved boys, ice cream, and sleepovers. In the first episode, her "identical cousin" Cathy Lane (also played by Duke) came over to the United States from Scotland to live with Patty's family. Their close physical resemblance to each other is explained by their fathers being identical twin brothers.

Patty's father, Martin (played by William Schallert, who also plays Cathy's father in a handful of episodes), was the managing editor of the fictitious New York Chronicle; Cathy's father also worked for the Chronicle as a foreign correspondent. It was Cathy's father's wish that she complete her secondary schooling in the United States before she would be allowed to return to Scotland. Cathy was much more worldly, and the aggravations that came from the two girls' very different personalities set the tone for much of the sitcom. The show's theme song, which has since been parodied many times over in pop culture, illustrates the two girls' differences: Cathy adores the minuet, the Ballet Russe, and crepes suzette, while Patty loved to rock 'n' roll; a hot dog "made her lose control."

Also seen was Patty's mother Natalie (played by Jean Byron) and Patty's brother Ross (played by Paul O'Keefe).

The dual role for Duke challenged special effects for its time, considering television special effects were altogether a new thing in the early 1960s. When special effects proved too demanding, child actress Rita McLaughlin was used as Duke's double. This would not be possible if the show were aired in color, because even though the two actresses' hair shades were the same in monochrome, Duke's was brown in real life while McLaughlin's was bright red.

Already a budding star in her own right, Duke was further thrust into the public consciousness through the show. As the series went on, her star power from the series allowed her to enter the realm of popular music, releasing a Top Ten single, "Don't Just Stand There", in 1965.

Although the series was still popular during its final season, ABC decided not to renew it for the '66/'67 season on the basis that filming it in color would have been prohibitively expensive.

In 1999 CBS aired The Patty Duke Show: Still Rockin' In Brooklyn Heights, which reunited most of the original cast, including Duke, Byron, O'Keefe, and Schallert. Patty and Richard married after high school, had a son, and are now amicably divorced (though toward the end of the movie they reconcile). Cathy is a widow living in Scotland, and has a teenage son. Most of the plot revolves around Patty's old rival Sue Ellen's plans to buy Brooklyn Heights High School, raze it, and replace it with a mall, which is opposed by Patty, Cathy, and the rest of the family.