The confusion over episodes 3 and 4

[torcan]

Over time, there's been some question as to what order episode 3 "Mother Meets What's His Name" and episode 4 "It Shouldn't Happen to a Dog" originally aired in, or if episode 4 aired when it was supposed to at all.

Some guides have the episodes reversed; one even states that, for some reason lost to history, episode 4 didn't air when scheduled and instead, was saved until the end of the season.

I'm here to dispute all of those claims.

For one thing, in doing online searches in newspapers.com or other sources, you can usually find when network shows were pre-empted and for what reasons (I've been involved with a lot of research on game show pre-emptions over the years).

There's nothing that jumps out for either Oct 1, 1964 (when episode 3 was originally scheduled), or Oct 8, 1964 (when episode 4 was originally scheduled) that would have pre-empted the show.

Also, I collect old TV Guides and have them all from 1964. In the Oct 24, 1964 edition of TVGuide, reviewer Cleveland Amory reviews Bewitched and even mentions in his review about seeing an episode recently where Samantha turned a client into a dog. I have a hard time believing he'd mention something that happened in an episode which hadn't actually aired.

My conclusion: episodes 3 and 4 aired when they were originally supposed to. Over time, for reasons unknown, someone's notes inadvertently reversed the order for these episodes. If something had been pre-empted, there were a couple of reruns they had during the regular season where they could have slotted this in. The fact that episode 4 was the first summer rerun in June is just a co-incidence.

[Schmoe56789]

I agree with you, if I'm following correctly. I think that in production, "Mother Meets What's His Name" WAS intended to be the third aired episode. It follows the narration pattern of the first two episodes, and clearly Sam and Darrin haven't fully moved in yet (lack of dishes, silverware, phone, etc.). However, I think it was actually aired fourth, perhaps because ABC demanded it for some reason. I also did a lot of research about 10 years ago to find original airdates and other things, and found that a lot of the newspaper TV listing descriptions for Oct. 8 sounded like "Mother Meets What's His Name," although the episode titles weren't listed. I think some of the Oct. 1 listings also sounded like "Mother," but some sounded like "It Shouldn't Happen to a Dog," so perhaps they were switched at the last minute. I have a press photo from "Mother" from a newspaper archive that is stamped Sept. 27, 1964, which would indicate they ran it before the Oct. 1 airing. However, all of the "Dog" press photos on Getty Images list the Oct. 1 airdate... but that could have been added retroactively. I've been hoping to get back to this research, because I stupidly didn't save PDF copies of a lot of the info I found.