Would You Consider 'Hogan's Heroes' An Early Model For An Ensemble Sitcom???

[Brian Damage]

An early ensemble-cast sitcom. Though the show had a lead character — Bob Crane’s acerbic Col. Robert E. Hogan — it was a classic group effort, each player a cog so essential that to remove one would be to wreck the machine. It was a template later followed by “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Seinfeld” and others, the seemingly contradictory ensemble comedy with a star.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/20...ichard-dawson/

[704Hauser]

Originally Posted by Brian Damage

An early ensemble-cast sitcom. Though the show had a lead character — Bob Crane’s acerbic Col. Robert E. Hogan — it was a classic group effort, each player a cog so essential that to remove one would be to wreck the machine. It was a template later followed by “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Seinfeld” and others, the seemingly contradictory ensemble comedy with a star.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/20...ichard-dawson/

Most definitely! I also think Hogan's Heroes may have served, in part, as a model for the Britcom Dad's Army.

[TMC]

Trivia

Don't have time right now to post anything of substance (insofar as this blog can have anything of substance), so here's a little bit of pointless trivia: the show M*A*S*H is usually cited as the antithesis of Hogan's Heroes. Yet M*A*S*H actually used several key people from Hogan. Gene Reynolds, the producer-director of Hogan's Heroes, was the producer-director of M*A*S*H. And Laurence Marks, one of the most prolific writers on Hogan, became one of the most prolific writers on M*A*S*H (for the first couple of seasons, he was the only writer besides Larry Gelbart who was on full-time staff).

Larry Gelbart, when asked about M*A*S*H's connections to Hogan, apparently tends to rant about how Hogan's Heroes was criminally evil and got laughter from denying the brutal reality of the Nazi atrocities and isn't it great that his show dared to show the real horror of war yada yada. But then Gelbart has always kind of struck me as a comedy writer with no sense of humor; I am not a fan of his mechanical joke writing and one-note characterization. And when I compare the way Hogan's Heroes made Colonel Klink a likable antagonist with Gelbart's boring characterization of Frank Burns (who could potentially have been an interesting character if Gelbart had bothered to make him one), and the character-based humor on Hogan to the irrelevant one-liners on M*A*S*H, I gotta say, Hogan's Heroes was a better show.

[Alan Brady's Hair]

The military sitcoms - including Bilko and McHale's Navy - were also early versions of workplace sitcoms.