Was This Short-Lived ’60s Sitcom Really The Worst Show To Ever Air On TV?

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The 1960s was truly a golden era for weird little shows that melded the quotidian and the fantastical. This was the decade that gave us the great fantasy sitcoms, in which some larger than life character with supernatural abilities would be slotted into a suburban setting for laughs. “Mister Ed” was one of the first, featuring a talking horse who could only be understood by his architect owner Wilbur Post (Alan Young). The much lesser-known “The Hathaways” was sort of in that vein as well. Rather than featuring an animal with fantastical powers, however, it featured three chimpanzees whose owners treated them as if they were actual children.

You might already be able to see why this series didn’t last longer than a single season. But not only was “The Hathaways” short-lived, it seemed to stoke significant ire among certain critics. In “Watching TV: Four Decades of American Television,” authors Harry Castleman and Walter J. Podrazik outright described the show as “possibly the worst series ever to air on network TV.”

Of course, such a claim is subjective. But there was an undeniably uncanny and slightly unsettling air to “The Hathaways,” which saw Peggy Cass’ Elinore Hathaway and Jack Weston’s Walter Hathaway acting as “parents” to their three chimpanzees, referring to them as “the kids” and dressing them in human clothing. The suburban Los Angeles couple seemed to have completely lost the plot, yet it was all played for laughs. At least, it was for about 10 months. After that, ABC quite sensibly pulled the plug.

The sheer volume of failed shows in TV history is kind of breathtaking when you consider the amount of effort that goes into these things. Scripts are written, casts and production teams assembled, sets designed, and significant amounts of money are spent. (In the case of the swiftly-cancelled 1970s TV flop “Supertrain,” we’re talking major sums.) How many actors have been convinced that they were on the verge of their big break, only to become yet another footnote in TV history? It’s weirdly tragic to think about. In the case of “The Hathaways,” its chimpanzee stars were likely unfazed by the show’s hasty cancellation, due to the fact they were in high demand elsewhere. That and they were literally animals.

Non-chimp leading man Jack Weston stars as Walter Hathaway, a real estate agent whose wife Elinore Hathaway acts as a mother to Candy, Charlie, and Enoch. These ape “kids” were part of the Marquis Chimps, a group of trained chimpanzees owned by Gene Detroy that were popular at the time. As the New York Times noted in a contemporaneous report ahead of the premiere of “The Hathaways,” “The chimps got their new job through a TV guest appearance on ‘The Jack Benny Show’ (…) Robert Sparks, executive producer of the new series, saw them on the ‘Benny’ program and decided to develop a series.”

That series saw Walter and Elinore taking care of their chimpanzee children while also booking them as a performing act, in which they would ride bicycles and build things. Otherwise, they would hang out at home, earning the Hathaways some strange looks from their neighbors. Other non-chimp cast members included Harvey Lembeck as talent agent Jerry Roper and Belle Montrose as neighbor Mrs. Harrison.

Was “The Hathaways” really one of the worst sitcoms of all time? Well, it was certainly strange. Perhaps, viewed in retrospect, the show feels a little too close to the unforgettable “Gordy” scene in Jordan Peele’s “Nope,” in which a chimpanzee mauls the entire cast and crew on the set of his sitcom. (Thankfully, nothing of the sort happened during filming on “The Hathaways.”) But there’s just something unsettling about the series, which seemed like a particularly cynical attempt at leveraging the chimps’ popularity, even at a time when fantasy sitcoms featuring similarly unusual setups were coming to the fore. As Harry Castleman and Walter J. Podrazik write in their book, “The premise itself was utterly degrading to both the audience and the actors,” adding that “The Hathaways” “stood as an embarrassing example of the depths programmers had reached in their desperate search for a chance hit in any format or premise.”

Unsurprisingly, the sitcom didn’t last long. “The Hathaways” debuted on ABC in October 1961 and was canceled by August 1962. A decade later, CBS tried its luck at a chimpanzee-led sitcom with “Me and the Chimp,” which starred Ted Bessell as a dentist who lives with his family and a chimpanzee named Buttons. It, too, lasted one season. For some reason, NBC thought it could do better and unleashed “Mr. Smith” in 1983, a sitcom about a talking orangutan (played by the same ape who accompanied Clint Eastwood in his controversial project “Any Which Way But Loose”) who becomes a political advisor after ingesting an experimental drug. Yep, one season. But “The Hathaways” remains the first and arguably the worst of these ape-led sitcoms.