Hear me out, this might be complicated…

Okay, the first 3 seasons were called Make Room for Daddy and Danny Williams had Jean Hagen as his wife Margaret.

Then was season 4, the first season now in reruns on Catchy Comedy and other/earlier platforms like CoziTV… Story went that Margaret had died….Danny marries Kathy at the end of that season (right? I’m not really a fan), and the rest of the series it’s Danny & Kathy with a few cast changes along the way.

I know by looking at old TV Guides, that NBC had MRFD showing in reruns in daytime, including Saturday mornings, when TV just started to target the youngsters; CBS had its primetime run as TDTS at the same time.

Assuming that NBC was only showing the Hagen eps (as Margaret was mentioned in the TVG synopses) while Danny was married to Kathy, was there any controversy insofar as having the young set think Danny was a bigamist or something? Even adults who didn’t follow the series would scratch their heads.

Were there any publications mentioning the possible confusion? AND….just because the names of the series were different, the character was Danny Williams in both, right?

Any info would be appreciated….and as usual, there will be a test on this….! :D

cd

The television press then was TV Guide, some gossip magazines, and newspaper columnists who covered everything from network shows to local radio ratings. If there was some confused soul out there, there was no way to expand it into a controversy.

NBC showed seasons 1 thru 9 on weekday mornings in the early 1960s; due to timing or whatever other reason, seasons 10 and 11 were not syndicated and were shelved until COZI TV showed them several years ago; local TV syndication had seasons 5 thru 9. I think those episodes were aired under the "Make Room for Daddy" name, with new intros. made for that purpose; those intros. have become rare and were last shown on MeTV syndicated episodes. Other "The Danny Thomas Show" intros. were made, possibly for primetime reruns on CBS; those are the ones attached to the broadcast episodes now The original primetime animated intros., with their unique theme and sponsor tags, are generally unavailable.

The above is of course off-topic stuff; I never heard about any controversy. Fewer viewers would have seen the ABC primetime episodes; viewership really picked up when the series moved to CBS starting with season 5, and many of them probablyd never saw the Jean Hagen episodes. Any viewers who saw the NBC reruns would have seen the whole sequence of things. Still later viewers of syndicated episodes would only see Marjorie Lord.

In later years Jean Hagen (Margaret) was retconned out of existence. Any flashbacks to those years did not include her.

The very last time the show aired Seasons 1-3 were on the NBC daytime schedule and they went up to season 8 and were usually aired in order so when Kathy joined the cast the only mention of the first wife Margaret was the opening episode in season 4. As the season progressed Danny meets Kathy as Rusty's nurse and the following season opened with their honeymoon with the kids. When the show started syndication in 1967 the package included season 5-9 only. IT wasn't until COZI-TV began airing the show they ran seasons 4-11, seasons 10 and 11 hadn't been seen since 1965!