TFTP Comedy: "The Monkees" (series premiere) from NBC (Sep. 12, 1966)

Posted to YouTube by user 'pedroverito'
Length - 25:03

"The Monkees" represented the confluence of two big trends in popular culture in the mid-1960s: first, that of mop-topped four-piece pop music combos, a trend launched, of course, by the Beatles (the Monkees, due to the contrivance of their very existence, were famously the "Pre-Fab Four" to the Beatles' "Fab Four"); the second trend was that of the zany hijinx of 1960s situation comedies. Shows like "The Beverly Hillbillies", "Bewitched", "Gilligan's Island", and "Get Smart" (and others) had laid the ground of zany hijinx well before the Monkees got to it in the fall of 1966.

The episode above is the first of the Monkees' eponymous sitcom "The Monkees". The group had been created with the express purpose of starring in the sitcom, and the original idea had been for the four to be just actors playing musicians. As time went on, the group (Davy Jones, Peter Tork, Michael Nesmith, and Micky Dolenz), which had several hit singles in the last half of the 1960s, took greater and greater control of its own music, and they now have a respectable reputation as a late-1960s pop music mainstay.

This premiere episode isn't really a pilot per se--there's no deliberate setting up of relationships or establishment of the overall situation of the series, as in most pilots--but it is a great example both of the slapstick and zany humor that this series would practice and of this type of humor that was found more generally in 1960s sitcoms. At the beach, Davy saves from drowning a princess from an obscure (fictional) country, and the boys spend the rest of the episode trying to defeat the nefarious plot by her uncle to kill her and seize power. Hilarity ensues.