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"We're the young generation, and we've got something to say."
By the time of the 1966-67 season, television comedy was still continuing in the "lives of entertainers" milieu, but the show that won the Emmy this year was drastically different from the traditional formula of Dick Van Dyke and Lucille Ball. The youth culture was on the upswing, and television was no longer just following middle-aged folks and their work issues. It was the height of the Beatles' popularity at the point where they finally stopped touring. And it was a time of shakeup in film techniques and comedy. Popular music was a synthesis of folk, country, and rock and roll, with eastern influences just coming in. Annette Funicello was no longer the little girl in Mickey Mouse ears, but a teen idol doing beach movies. Into this cultural sea emerged a strange sort of parody/commentary on the times, The Monkees.
Conceived partially as an American response to The Beatles (but only partially), The Monkees was a series about a struggling fictional four-man teenage rock band as they tried to make it big and had wacky adventures in the meantime. Unlike long-take 3-camera sitcoms of the day, The Monkees was shot on film with lots of rapid cuts. People like to blame MTV for the shortened attention span of the young folks, but the rapid-fire editing was being done on The Monkees 15 years earlier. Heavily influenced by both the Richard Lester Beatles movies (A Hard Day's Night and Help!), as well as older comedy groups like the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges (and I would argue a dash of the contemporary Beatles cartoon), The Monkees was a unique exploration in comedy that combined wordplay, parody, satire, slapstick, sight gags, onscreen text, improv, camera tricks, funny props, and just about anything you can think of into a wacky musical stew that somehow worked.
The four boys eventually cast would be Davy Jones, Mickey Dolenz, Mike Nesmith, and Peter Tork. Jones had been a child actor on the Broadway stage who played Artful Dodger in the original cast of Oliver! and had recently started his own music career. In fact, his debut album, David Jones, makes a brief appearance in one episode. Mickey Dolenz was also a former child actor, having starred in the TV series Circus Boy. Peter Tork and Mike Nesmith both came more out of the folk music scene, and Nesmith at the time was recording and performing under the pseudonym Michael Bessing. This strange assortment of performers with their variant personalities formed to create the personalities of the characters The Monkees who shared their names. The Monkees were never real... until they sort of were.
Like other Emmy-winning series we've looked at, there was a musical component to the show and every episode featured at least one song performed by the band. Many of the songs were written by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, but other of their popular songs had writing credits from such names as Neil Diamond and Gerry Goffin and Carole King. Nesmith would contribute a few songs of his own in the first season as well. One was rejected as a Monkees tune, but Mike performs a quick version of it anyway on the show in one scene. That song, "Different Drum", would go on to be a success for The Stone Poneys and a young Linda Rondstadt. On most of the early recordings the songs are played by studio musicians and The Monkees only provide vocals (though the boys do play some instruments on a few tracks). When the songs started charting, an eventual backlash started that The Monkees were a phony band who didn't play their own stuff. The truth is complicated because yes, The Monkees are a fake band, a television fiction, but the members of the band are actual performers and musicians who absolutely can sing and play instruments. But once the group started releasing actual records, and then they started actually touring as a band, the lines got very muddy. The final episode of the first season is actually a sort of documentary following one tour stop for the band and showing them as a performing group. The line between the television personalities and the actual personalities of the boys is very strange here, but in a way it best captures the curious fiction and reality of The Monkees as a band.
The music in the show is good and has a definite sound of that era, particularly with a flavor of that sort of Beatles "Rubber Soul" sound, and other music circa 1965. The theme song is reminiscent ofTthe Dave Clark Five's "Catch Us If You Can". The musical sequences are often irrelevant to the plot, featuring lots of edits, strange locales, costumes, and gags. They are very much stylistically a bridge from the Beatles films to modern music videos. They are often a lot of fun.
The storylines themselves are also often ridiculous. For example, in order to make money the boys might find themselves working for an evil toy manufacturer. Or Davy might fall in love with some girl who is actually an heiress or princess. Or the boys might find themselves in the middle of a haunted house or ghost town. It has the real flavor of a cartoon or the old 1930s serials where characters might just show up in random places.
But unique here is that the Monkees all live together in one beach-front apartment with no adult supervision. Apart from a manager character in the pilot episode, the Monkees are their own men. They live by themselves, take care of their own lives, and try to deal with the hassle of adults who want the rent, won't give them jobs, won't let them date. They are a kind of ultimate fantasy for their teenage audience. They aren't beholden to an adult; they make group decisions and Mike is the de facto leader. They are also not wealthy superstars. They just want to have fun and make a living. On their wall is a framed embroidery reminding that "Money is the root of all evil". They aren't the Beatles; but they would like to be. They are sweet guys who want to help people in trouble. It's very much a show about the youth of America and for them.
And it's funny! Because the humor is so varied in style, there's always something to laugh about. The one bit that cracked me up so much this time around is when they are throwing a party and just randomly at one point Mr. Clean walks in and starts washing the windows. It's never commented on, he just shows up.
It's so bizarre and random and ridiculous, but that's what you get with this show. An episode might end in a sword fight, or a character might break the fourth wall and walk off backstage to check the script. There's a magical sense of realism where they will suddenly be in different outfits just for a bit. Peter might be able to shoot a man with his finger, or Mike might talk a computer into self-destructing. There's one episode that features a prolonged parody of the Adam West Batman series. And a lot of personality, dialogue, or character comes out of improvisation. That kind of energy really keeps the show alive and sets it apart from other shows of that time.
One negative about the music in the show though is that the same song tended to be used a lot for a block of shows, so if you watch a lot in a row, you'll hear "Last Train to Clarksville" in five episodes in a row, and then never again. I suppose it's due to not having many songs recorded early on, but it would have served the series better to have banked at least 10 songs before shooting. Once the hit single comes out, you hear it in a number of shows. But I suppose this would be less of a problem watching it week to week, especially if you tuned in because you hoped to hear "I'm a Believer" again. In later syndicated reruns, sometimes some songs were swapped out for others.
When I was a kid, this was briefly run on Nick at Nite for one summer. I remember at the time my favorite was Peter, but watching it again now I really connect to Mike. Mike always wears a wool hat on the show. Why? Because Mike wore it to the audition and somehow it stood out so much to producers that they thought of him as the "wool hat guy". In several early episodes, they even call him Woolhat. This sort of became an annoyance to Nesmith. In looking back, Nesmith seems like the George Harrison of the group. He has a different energy, but he's got a lot of talent and by his own admission he didn't always understand what was happening here. But he's a bit of special sauce for the show because even if he's not the teen heartthrob or the one doing as many wacky voices, or the lovable idiot, he's got a folksy playful sense and contributes a lot to the music of the show.
It's also interesting that they let a shorter man like Davy Jones be essentially the "cute one" in the group. Funny to think about, but usually the girls are falling for Davy in episodes and in a culture where there's often an expectation that the boy be taller than the girl, it's nice that it plays out that way. Not that they don't address his height; they do, and sometimes with good-natured teasing, but all in good fun and never mean-spirited.
At the end of some episodes that come up short, there would be improvised interview segments between creator Bob Rafelson and the band. The boys would sometimes drop character a little bit in these segments, and the audience could get to know a little bit about who these guys are. Sometimes they were just playing around and giving joke answers, like the Beatles or Bob Dylan would do in interviews, but at other times things might creep a tad into the serious. There was one particular episode where they were discussing youth demonstrations or riots that were in the news of the day. And these young men just shared their honest opinions about it. That sort of encapsulates the new sense of the late 1960s that The Monkees as a show was presenting; they times they were a-changin'.
Of course, it was the 1960s, and some of the content is something you couldn't really do today with modern sensibilities. The biggest offender is "Monkee Chow Mein" in which the a Chinese restaurant is actually a front for nefarious foreign spies. Though Asian actors are used as background characters, the leads are white men in broad yellowface makeup doing stereotypical "so solly" accents. It's a shame this puts such a sour taste in the mouth today, because the episode is basically a riff on contemporary comedy series Get Smart (which would win the Emmy the following year). The gypsy episode also wouldn't fare too well today. Another mark of how times have changed is in NBC's censorship of "Davey and Fern". In this episode, the Fern character appears in one scene in a bikini and NBC must have found it too revealing because they smear every shot where you can see anything below the shoulders in a blur effect. This was back when Barbara Eden wasn't allowed to show her bellybutton on I Dream of Jeannie, but it's weird seeing a character's torso randomly obscured by what looks like vaseline all over the lens.
Winning the Emmy Award for Comedy Series over standbys like The Andy Griffith Show or new fare like Bewitched shows that the time was right for new comedy, that ostensibly a children's show could be taken seriously for doing something so different and yet contemporary. They also won an Emmy for Best Directing. But apart from awards, perhaps the best praise the show could get is that apparently John Lennon watched and was a fan. The final moments of the first season are Mike Nesmith at radio microphone, after The Monkees had "taken over" a local radio station during their tour, thanking various groups and performers who they like, ending with "We'd like to thank The Beatles for getting this whole thing started." That about sums it up, Mike.
FAVORITE EPISODES: Royal Flush; Monkee See, Monkey Die; Monkee vs Machine; The Chaperone; I've Got a Little Song Here; Davy and Fern; I Was a Teenage Monster; Find the Monkees; Monkees a la Mode; Monkees at the Movies
UP NEXT: Get Smart
