What Might've Been: The New Phil Silvers Show (1963)

 Four years after the end of You'll Never Get Rich, aka The Phil Silvers Show, aka Sgt. Bilko, Phil Silvers was back on TV. That was the good news. The bad? The New Phil Silvers Show was little more than a reprise of Bilko, but in a civilian setting, and while Silvers played a new character, Harry Grafton, it was more of the same.

I was but an infant when this show bowed in the fall of 1963 on CBS. It had been two years since Hanna-Barbera's funny animal knockoff of Bilko, Top Cat, had bowed on ABC, only to end up cancelled after 1 season. Silvers would suffer the same fate, if only because of his self-typecasting.

Grafton was a factory foreman who, like Bilko before him, was more interested in scamming his way to a bigger payday, but always failing. Unlike his contemporaries, Jackie Gleason and Lucille Ball, Silvers wasn't able to duplicate his success with the new series. Producer Rod Amateau made some changes late in the season, turning it into a domestic sitcom, but, by then, it was too late.

The first time I'd actually seen Silvers on screen was in a Disney movie, of all things, "The Boatniks", with Robert Morse, a few years after this series had ended. I would later see reruns of Bilko on the cable, but had not laid eyes on The New Phil Silvers Show, the first series to carry the label of Gladasya Productions, Silvers' production company, until recently.

Edit, 2/7/24: Had to change the video. Here's a sample intro:

Silvers' wife, Evelyn Wright, had a recurring gig on the show, too, including this episode.

Rating: B-.