With Get Smart in its 2nd season, producer Leonard Stern sought to expand Talent Associates' comedy roster. As we already know, Run, Buddy, Run was a decided flop for CBS. Stern's next entry for NBC was, too.
What Stern sought to do with The Hero was illustrate how different the real world was from show business. Sam Garret (Richard Mulligan) was the star of a Gunsmoke-like Western, Jed Clayton---US Marshal, but at home, he was a bumbling klutz.
And that's where the show fell apart. Viewers were already accustomed to a bumbling klutz on another network, namely ABC's F-Troop (Ken Berry as Capt. Wilton Parmenter), and both characters, you can say, could owe their existence to Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau in "The Pink Panther", which made the art of slapstick pratfalls trendy again. The show-within-a-show concept, though, was different.
Unfortunately, as I've been told, The Hero barely aired in the home district, if at all, as then-NBC affiliate WRGB opted for other programming in order to pick up some advertising revenues for themselves. As a result, The Hero barely got past Christmas.
Gilmore Box provides the intro:
No rating, obviously.
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