This book was supported by funds from the Baylor Arts & Humanities Faculty Research Program Committee and the Vice Provost for Research, and I am grateful. I would like to thank my institution, Baylor University, for giving me my dream job, the Chair of our English Department, Dr. Kevin Gardner, for always supporting my research and teaching interests, my students, for bringing me unimaginable...

I was born the only child of three in my family to have dark hair and a largebirthmark on my temple. My older sister and younger brother—I am the middle child—both have beautiful blonde hair, and my dark hair color alone always made me feel different as a child. The birthmark on my face, though, sealed the deal in making me unique. Later, when I was the only one to develop...

The Patty Duke Show began airing in September of 1963 and ran for three years; it is still enjoying a wide audience in syndication. In the show, Patty Duke plays identical cousins, Patty and...

After directing nine episodes of The Patty Duke Show in its first season, with his final season-one episode occurring in May of 1964, William Asher began directing another production that coincidentally, just like The Patty Duke Show, featured twins: Bewitched. The series was created by Sol Saks, who previously and subsequently worked with Sherwood Schwartz, creator of Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch. Saks wrote only the pilot episode and claimed the concept was based on ideas from the films I Married a...

Following a successful first season of Bewitched and while still writing for The Patty Duke Show, Sheldon was asked to create another show, one that could resemble Bewitched, featuring twins with supernatural abilities: I Dream of Jeannie. After refusing to marry a djinn, Jeannie (Barbara Eden) is exiled to a bottle for 2000 years. Astronaut Tony...

This chapter combines the analyses of three series: Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Bunch, and Doctor Who. Unlike Bewitched, which had 22 episodes featuring evil cousin Serena, The Patty Duke Show, which had all episodes featuring twin cousins, and I Dream of Jeannie, which had 9 episodes featuring the evil sister Jeannie,...

The distinction of male...

I have often been asked why I continue to spend so much time researching television series that began airing over fifty years ago. Thus far, my responses have always involved something about how I grew up watching these shows and how they served to program my own observations and experiences as an adult, student, teacher, and scholar. This study, however, reveals that these shows seem to have had...

Kristi Rowan Humphreys is a Lecturer in the Department of English at Baylor University. She specializes in gender media and popular culture studies, film musicals and musical theater, and the visual culture of novelist William Faulkner. Her first monograph, Housework and Gender in American Television: Coming Clean, examined representations of housework and their relationships with...