James Henerson, writer for I Dream of Jeannie, talks about the "Samantha Blinks" incident (From an interview for the Book "Diary of a Genie" by Richard D. Barnes):

I had been writing Bewitched,which was across the hall from I Dream of Jeannie at Screen Gems i n Hollywood. I had been ther efor two years, and I had written a couple of episodes before that.

I got Fired off Bewitched, by the way...

Bill Asher, who was the producer of that show, and who was married to Elizabeth Montgomery (Samantha) at the time, had said that nobody who worked on Bewitched was allowed to work on Jeannie. He was convinced that somehow or another Sidney Sheldon had "stolen" the idea from Bewitched, which was silly, since Bewitched was taken from an old Thorn Smith novel called "Married to a Witch."

Anyway, he had this rule that anyone who worked on Bewitched could never work on Jeannie. But one night...I was blurry eyed because I was working on scripts for both at the same time...I wrote in a Bewitched script,

"Samantha Blinks."

Bill caught it, and it exposed me! He knew I was working for Jeannie because Jeannie is the one who blinks her eyes, while Samantha wiggles her nose when she wants something to happen, and he fired me!

So why wasn't I caught before? oh, I see what you mean...the scripts were for the next season, so they wouldn't have been on the air, and I didn't basically care.

I think this must have been during the summer, before the shows went on the air, because at the time I really didn't care. How did that work? Because it was absolutely a rule...he must have just instituted the rule anyway.

I think Asher could be somewhat of a tyrant on the show. He directed several episodes.

Asher directed more than several episodes. He directed 131 episodes (almost half the series run), and he eventually became the producer during the end of the run. I don't know if he was a tyrant or not, but the fact that the show is still so popular today is a testament to his vision and work ethnics.