Nanny and the Professor Boned the Fish When...

[TMC]

http://www.bonethefish.com/viewtopics.php?3094

Playing upon the popular successes of Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and other magical nannies of literature, this TV series posited another ostensibly magical British Nanny taking care of a family in need of direction. However unlike the candid magicality aforementioned, this nanny's paranormal nature was much more suggestive and non-committal as to whether she was or wasn't magical. The Nanny's wards as well as the audience were always left with the question of Figalilly's abilities unanswered.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070225...ptheshark.com/

• Other Thoughts:
  
  I don't remember this show much. Wasn't the little girl on Hello, Larry?
  I loved this show when I was a little girl. The Nanny was Julliet Mills and I think the Dad was Jared from The Big Valley. I remember the Nanny had some special powers (very sublime) so it was a little like a Mary Poppins. I can't remember, but I don't think she ever married the dad even though they were a cute couple.
  I remember watching this in syndication some years after it got canned. It was yet another late '60s-early '70s "trendy" look at a one parent family, with a housekeeper as the surrogate other parent, as in Mrs. Livingston on Eddie's Father and Mr. French on Family Affair, etc., except not as good. The father (the late Richard Long, the guy from Big Valley) was the professor and he had three kids: Hal, the oldest; Butch, the middle; Prudence, the youngest (played by Kim Richards); and a dog named Waldo. There was no mother and I don't remember if they ever explained why. In her place was "Nanny," a prim, proper but charming British governess whose "magical" ability consisted of being able to predict things that were going to happen or make them happen if need be. The only episode plot I fully remember was one in which the professor's fellow faculty members (which, I believe included <gulp> Howard Cosell) decide to take on Hal's teenage buddies in a game of touch football and the kids wipeout the out-of-shape teachers. Scintillating television. Anyway, Juliet Mills was kind of hot and had a sexy English accent, and there was a tiny degree of unspoken sexual tension between her and the professor, although most of it was left to the imagination. Which is probably why this show didn't last long.
  Phoebe Figgerlilly IS a silly name.
  "Nanny & the Professor" was WAAAAAY groovy, right from it's trippy opening theme song & graphics. "Phoebe Figalilly is a silly name..." But the major drawback to N&P was that Nanny never broke out of "prim & proper" mode and skanked out like the freak we all knew she was. Nanny (Juliet Mills) now plays some goofy-ass evil witch on the even-goofier daytime soap, "Passions". Nowadays, her leathery face is sporting more lines than a Rand McNally Road Atlas- maybe it was a good thing Nanny never busted out her naughty bits- her best days are long since gone...
  This show was very mysterious and way ahead of its time. A sort of modern day Mary Poppins. I really thought this show was magical.
  I think the only time I watched Nanny and the Professor was during the 1970-71 season. That was because it aired in-between "The Brady Bunch" and "The Partridge Family." I thought this show was fairly good. When the FX cable channel first started, Nanny reruns were on the schedule every Saturday and Sunday. All of the episodes from that one year I could remember very well. The show where Professor Everett makes a raft out of a sawed up telephone pole. The raft falls apart and he falls in but the water is only three feet deep. Then he pushes the raft to wherever they were going. The show with the Nanny's uncle "the human fly" who is too old to still do his act. The uncle gets locked in his room and somebody else (Nanny?) does the human fly routine. Then I started seeing shows with Elsa Lanchester as Nanny's aunt. When she was on the show focused on her and not on the kids and Nanny. I found out that Nanny had been renewed after it's Brady/Partridge year, but ABC moved it to Mondays opposite "Gunsmoke" and "Laugh-in" and after that the magic was gone and it got canceled. Because we always watched Laugh-In, I was seeing about 12 shows for the first time but they weren't nearly as good. As a side note, the lady from the Purina Cat Chow commercials was in this once in awhile as the Everett's pushy neighbor.
  Nanny and the Professor never jumped. The ABC Network JTS when they removed "Nanny and Professor" from its snug little home between "The Bradys and The Partridges" and stuck it on before "Monday Night Football". What "Assh----" made that move. Nanny was perfectly at home on TGIF and that's waaaaaay before there was a TGIF! ABC stuck this sweet little Mary Poppins-ish sitcom in a horrible time slot. I wish Nanny had been a real person and she could have turned the head of programming at ABC into a toad! Nanny deserved a longer run! After all Nanny was soft and sweet. Wise and wonderful. She was our mystical, magical Nanny.
  I only saw one episode, but the lighting was horrid. It was so dark in every scene that I couldn't see a damn thing. Add to that the 70s colours (mostly browns) and the average quality of the film (high grain,) and you get a show that is almost unwatchable based solely on the fact that you can't see anything! The plot also moved like a brick, making the hour long show seem like about 2 1/2 hours. It was so drab and boring. I just hope every episode wasn't like this.
  I remember the quick little musical jingle that would play when the Nanny would do her thing. Kim Richards was such a cute little girl as Prudence. No wonder she turned out as beautiful. On a sad note Trent Lehman who played Butch was a victim of the "Never able to get work after childhood stardom" and committed suicide in 1982. The show had a quick cup of coffee, but had a good concept. Rest in peace Richard Long and Trent Lehman.
  Nanny and The Professor Never Jumped the Shark, It was never even given the Chance, TPTB Move it to a crappy spot and away from its cozy place on Friday Nights between the Bradys and the Partridges, But worst of all Richard Long was Stabbed and Killed in a shopping Mall in 1971, so the show had an abrupt ending. As for Juliet Mills being on that crappy show Passions, which it is, at least she's a working actress! The Best eip. Ever was when Hal, Butch found a picture of Nanny being Burned at the stake during the Salem Witch Trials, in their School History Book!
  Richard Long's oldest son hit puberty and his voice cracked
  Richard long died in December of 1974. He was not murdered, and his death had nothing to do with the cancellation of the show.
  I can't be real specific, but I was still in public school when this show aired, and I remember discussing the show in general with a girl who was pretty smart and we agreed that initially we got the feeling the specialness of the nanny was an unexplained, unexplainable thing hovering between positive thinking and psychic ability. But in short order, maybe in the first half dozen episodes, it turned into "magic," and that was an overdone deal by 1970. We likened it to the difference between the The Turn of the Screw movie The Innocents (original nanny, good) and Mary Poppins (later nanny, unsatisfying). I really liked that girl and would have tried to date her but she was going with a college boy or guy in the service or something. I sure could have used a magical nanny! Because "Ever since the nanny came to stay with us, fantastic things keep happening..."
  I loved THE NANNY AND THE PROFESSOR when I was a kid on ABC. Actually, one of the things that made the show so appealing to me is the fact that what Phoebe Figallily was was never really explained. She wasn't a witch like Samantha and she wasn't a Jeannie like Jeannie. She didn't have superpowers like Superman or a utility belt and state of the art technology like Batman. The creators sort of left it to us to try and figure out was so special about Nanny. Juliet Mills was absolutely charming in the title role and worked well with Richard Long as the second half of the title role. David Doremus, Trent Lehman (whose death I only learned about through this site) and Kim Richards were watchable as TV kids go. This was a fun fantasy that never jumped the shark.
  The new primetime access law that went into effect in 1971 may have had more blame for this show's demise than ABC. In the 1970-71 season, Nanny aired between The Brady Bunch, then at 7:30 PM ET, and The Partridge Family at 8:30 PM ET. In the fall of 1971, the networks were forced to give up a half-hour of primetime each night Monday thru Saturday, so networks had to give back the 7:30 PM timeslot to their affiliates then. In order for the Brady/Nanny/Partridge shows to continue to air in that order, the Partridge Family would have had to move to 9 PM ET, which was past a lot of young kids' bedtimes, even on Friday night. I suppose that Nanny had the weakest ratings of the three, so it was moved to the deadly Monday night timeslot, before Monday Night Football. Since MNF was carried live across the whole country, Nanny had to be aired after MNF on the West Coast, since MNF started at 6 PM PT, so the show would have been airing past 9 PM there, or moved to another timeslot, and the same likely happened in the Rockies, since MT ran MNF from 7-10 PM local time, which coincides w/ MT primetime, so Nanny was either preempted altogether or aired at some other varying times there. The other night I watched a copy of the show's 4th episode that I got w/ original commercials. It had Joanna Barnes, whom I loved in the original Parent Trap movie, as a child psychologist who persuades Prof. Everett to enroll her kids in a program of hers, since being around Nanny, in her opinion, has led them into flights of fancy. They enroll in her program, and eventually chaos results for reasons that I will not disclose here. The show was a lot of fun to revisit for me.

[KurtfromPitts]

I think the PTAR definitely should be blamed for NatP's demise. I always thought Nanny fit in perfectly with Brady and Partridge.

[PracTz]

Does anyone even remember this show besides it having starred the onetime Disney child/teen star Hayley Mills's younger sister?