The Paul Lynde Show

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Paul Lynde Show title card

The Paul Lynde Show was a short-lived ABC television series starring Paul Lynde from 1972 to 1973 .

[edit] Setting

The show starred Lynde as the father of a family that consisted of his wife and daughter. The show was based on an obscure Broadway play, "Howie", whose title character, Howard, was the daughter's boyfriend.^{[citation needed]} However, critics perceived the show as derivative of All in the Family, then television's most-popular primetime program.

[edit] Production

It is perceived that the sitcom was created in order to hide the fact that Lynde, then best known as the highly flamboyant center square on The Hollywood Squares, was a homosexual, thus they decided to give him a show in which he played father to a family.^{[citation needed]} However, Lynde's over-the-top comedic talents were largely wasted in a too-conservative and straightforward role. Chemistry between the main characters was somewhat lacking and many episodes had the misfortune of ending with the predictable crescendo of someone falling into Lynde's pool, an event somehow funnier the first five times they used it.

The Paul Lynde Show lasted only one season (26 episodes), opposite the first half of the Top 30 hit The Carol Burnett Show on CBS and the Top 20 hit Adam-12 on NBC. However, Lynde continued as center square with great success on The Hollywood Squares for years to come, until its cancellation in 1981.

William Asher, who produced then-wife Elizabeth Montgomery's sitcom Bewitched, produced the show for Screen Gems as a replacement for Bewitched; Lynde had appeared numerous times on Bewitched as the "Uncle Arthur" character. The next season, Asher cast him as the male lead on his other show, Temperatures Rising, which lasted until 1974.