The Monkees broke the fourth wall of 1960s TV

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The Monkees TV show debuted almost 50 years ago, on September 12, 1966. While some of the show’s antics may appear pretty tame by today’s standards, at the time, it was a groundbreaker. Created to capitalize on Beatlemania by creating an American version of the Fab Four, on The Monkees, a group of four strangers somehow managed to have instant, off-the-wall chemistry, making it an immediate hit and eventual Emmy winner for Best Comedy Series.

It helped that in 1966, the show’s creators were ahead of the cultural curve. The Monkees debuted a year before The Summer Of Love, but the hippie counterculture aesthetic was already in play. Producers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider (who created their own production company, RayBert) would eventually take their Monkees money to fund not only the confusing Monkee movie, Head, but also Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, films that wound up defining that era’s youth rebellion. But before Jack Nicholson ordered a chicken-salad sandwich with no chicken and Peter Fonda climbed onto a motorcycle, there was The Monkees. It offered American youth a show of their own, something that their parents didn’t like and couldn’t understand.

In 1966, The Monkees was the first TV show that had only young people in the lead, with no “adult” figure in sight (no parent, no manager). When the show premiered, musicians Mike Nesmith and Peter Tork were in their early 20s (both were born in 1942); actors Micky Dolenz and Davy Jones were 21 and 20, respectively. It was also unusual that the four didn’t have any character names but essentially played themselves: Mike the older leader, Davy the heartthrob, Micky the wacky cutup, and Peter the childlike innocent. They lived alone in a grubby but charming beach house (complete with needlepoint sampler that stated, “Money Is The Root Of All Evil”). The fourth wall was broken repeatedly, with Micky walking off set to visit the writers’ room or Davy stopping midscene to ask to take a line over again.

The Monkees won over youth culture with its four charismatic players in a series of subversive yet charming half hours. Most of the drama stemmed from familiar tropes (the monster movie, the gangster movie, the spy movie) while making fun of those tropes to the point of absurdity. The four young men, absolute strangers, had skyrocketing chemistry “instantly,” Dolenz reported to CBS recently: “It was scary.” The show’s excellent music—each episode usually featured at least two songs—didn’t hurt either, as The Monkees had the distinction of conquering the music charts and the TV ratings at the same time. The songs were backed by what the show creators called “Monkee romps,” early versions of music videos. Not coincidentally, a few years later, Nesmith would take the fortune his mother left him (she invented Liquid Paper) to help kick off the music-video industry, becoming the first person to win a Grammy for Best Video.

The show featured other future film writers and actors like Paul Mazursky, and TV staples like Rose Marie and Bobby Sherman. But in such volatile times, The Monkees was only destined to last a few seasons. By year two, the boys were burned out from a grueling schedule, which included filming, recording, and touring. After they protested, the laugh track was deleted in season two, which somehow made their Stooges/Marx Brothers slapstick all the more surreal. The cast then added their own segments: Jones brought his friend Charlie Smalls on to talk about soul music. Nesmith had Frank Zappa appear to show everyone how to “play a car.” The show’s very last scene is Tim Buckley (Jeff’s dad) singing “Song To The Siren,” which was later covered by The Cocteau Twins. The preceding episode, written and directed by Dolenz, has the band saving the world from being hypnotized by television, one last raspberry blown at the very medium that made The Monkees famous.

In honor of the 50th anniversary of The Monkees and The Monkees, here are 10 typical episodes that highlight what the show did best. There’s never been another series like it, before or since: It combined pop music and a fourth-wall aesthetic to capture a crucial sliver of time for a particular generation of young people.