Writer's popular TV shows defied critic's barbs

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Nick Ut / The Associated Press Writer/producer Sherwood Schwartz receives a kiss from actresses Florence Henderson, left, and Dawn Wells in 2008. (CP)

LOS ANGELES -- Sherwood Schwartz, writer-creator of two of the best-remembered TV series of the 1960s and 1970s, Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch, has died.

Great-niece Robin Randall said Schwartz, 94, died at 4 a.m. Tuesday.

Schwartz was hospitalized at Cedars Sinai Medical Center about a week ago with an intestinal infection and underwent several surgeries. His wife, Mildred, and children have been at his side, said his nephew, Douglas Schwartz.

Sherwood Schwartz and his brother, Al, started as a writing team in TV's famed 1950s Golden Age, said Douglas Schwartz, the late Al Schwartz's son.

"They helped shape television in its early days," Douglas Schwartz said. "Sherwood is an American classic, creating Brady Bunch and Gilligan's Island, iconic shows that are still popular today. He continued to produce all the way up into his 90s."

Sherwood Schwartz was working on a big-screen version of Gilligan's Island, his nephew said. Douglas Schwartz, who created the hit series Baywatch, called his uncle a longtime mentor and caring "second father."

Success was the hallmark of Sherwood Schwartz's own career. Neither Gilligan nor Brady pleased the critics, but both managed to reverberate in viewers' heads through the years as few such series did, lingering in the language and inspiring parodies, spinoffs and countless jokes.

Schwartz gave up a career in medical science to write jokes for Bob Hope's radio show. He went on to write for other radio and TV shows, including The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.

He dreamed up Gilligan's Island in 1964,a Robinson Crusoe story about seven disparate travellers marooned on a deserted Pacific Island after their small boat wrecks in a storm.

TV critics hooted at Gilligan's Island as gag-ridden corn. Audiences adored it. Schwartz insisted that the show had social meaning along with the laughs: "I knew that by assembling seven different people and forcing them to live together, the show would have great philosophical implications."

He argued that his sitcoms didn't rely on cheap laughs. "I think writers have become hypnotized by the number of jokes on the page at the expense of character," Schwartz said in a 2000 Associated Press interview.

"When you say the name Gilligan, you know who that is. If a show is good, if it's written well, you should be able to erase the names of the characters saying the lines and still be able to know who said it. If you can't do that, the show will fail."

Gilligan's Island lasted on CBS from 1964 to 1967, and it was revived in later seasons with three high-rated TV movies. A children's cartoon, The New Adventures of Gilligan, appeared on ABC from 1974 to 1977, and in 2004, Schwartz had a hand in producing a TBS reality show called The Real Gilligan's Island.

The name of the boat on Gilligan's Island -- the S.S. Minnow -- was a bit of TV inside humour: It was named for Newton Minow, who as Federal Communications Commission chief in the 1960s had become famous for proclaiming television "a vast wasteland."

Minow took the jibe in good humour, saying later that he had a friendly correspondence with Schwartz.

TV writers usually looked upon The Brady Bunch as a sugarcoated view of American family life.

The premise: a widow (Florence Henderson) with three daughters marries a widower (Robert Reed) with three sons. (Widowhood was a common plot point in TV series back then, since networks were leery of divorce.) During the 1970s when the nation was rocked by social turmoil, audiences seemed comforted by watching an attractive, well-scrubbed family engaged in trivial pursuits.

Schwartz claimed in 1995 that his creation had social significance because "it dealt with real emotional problems: the difficulty of being the middle girl; a boy being too short when he wants to be taller; going to the prom with zits on your face."

The series lasted from 1969 to 1974, but it had an amazing afterlife, including three one-season spinoffs: The Brady Bunch Hour (1977); The Brady Brides (1981); and The Bradys (1990). The Brady Bunch Movie, with Shelley Long and Gary Cole as the parents, was a surprise box-office hit in 1995.

It was followed the next year by a less successful A Very Brady Sequel.

Sherwood Schwartz was born in 1916 in Passaic, N.J., and grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. His brother, already working for Hope, got him a job when Sherwood was still in college.

"Bob liked my jokes, used them on his show and got big laughs. Then he asked me to join his writing staff," Schwartz said during an appearance in March 2008, when he got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. "I was faced with a major decision -- writing comedy or starving to death while I cured those diseases. I made a quick career change."

Besides his wife, Schwartz's survivors include sons Donald, Lloyd and Ross Schwartz, and daughter Hope Juber.

-- The Associated Press

Obituary / Sherwood Schwartz

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 13, 2011 D8