The Twilight Zone's Rod Serling Played A Reclusive Writer In This Forgotten Sitcom
Imagine, if you will, a sleepy small town. The people who live there are hard-working, stubborn, and most of all, suspicious of outsiders. Enter one Bob Majors, a newspaperman from New York. Majors is a man of progress and change, but he's about to come up against a social wall the likes of which he's never seen. It's the kind of obstacle that can only be found in ... well, not "The Twilight Zone."
You might have read that description in the voice of famed "Twilight Zone" creator-narrator Rod Serling, but it's actually the premise of a totally different show in which Serling appeared — reportedly in his first non-narrator acting role — for just one episode in the early 1960s. The series was "Ichabod and Me," a poorly-received and short-lived series whose history is chronicled in David C. Tucker's book "Lost Laughs of '50s and '60s Television." The sitcom starred the similarly named Robert Sterling, who had previously led the more successful series "Topper," and who would go on to quit acting after "Ichabod" got canceled. In "Ichabod and Me," Sterling played a former New York Times writer who decides to uproot his city life to raise his son somewhere more rural — the town of Phippsboro, New Hampshire.
A brief history of Ichabod and Me
According to Tucker's research, "Ichabod and Me" seemed promising from the start due to the involvement of "Leave it to Beaver" co-creators Bob Mosher and Joe Connelly, who made this show together and would go on to helm another big hit with "The Munsters." The series also had the aid of popular comic Jack Benny's production company. Yet early reviews for the series — which was rebuilt after a failed pilot — were abysmal. Descriptions of the show call to mind the exhausting townsfolk subplots of modern series "Gilmore Girls," only much less funny and without beloved characters to ground the scenes. Columnist Harriet Van Horne wrote one of the most scathing reviews, quoted in Tucker's book: "A network that would buy 'Ichabod' for prime evening time would buy the Brooklyn Bridge from a tavern drunk — and pay cash."
The eventual cancellation of "Ichabod and Me" came as no surprise, but the show still made history in one small way with a key guest star spot. Serling, by then already working on fellow CBS show "The Twilight Zone," appeared in a single episode of the show as a very private writer named Eugene Hollenfield in 1962. A year earlier, Time magazine had declared author J.D. Salinger a recluse, and the topic of antisocial literary geniuses was apparently on America's mind. The episode saw Bob and the former newspaperman's daughter Abby (Christine White) cornily pretend to be beatniks to try to score an interview with Hollenfield, but according to Serling himself, the whole thing was a wash. "I never had a line that resembled the English language," he's quoted as saying in Rick Du Brow's Television in Review column (per Tucker).
Serling had better things to do
Fragments of "Ichabod and Me" including Serling's entire episode still remain on YouTube, and it's easy to see what the "Twilight Zone" mastermind meant. The scripts are dull, line deliveries fall flat, and the entire series lacks any real sense of tension. In Serling's episode, at the supposedly reclusive celebrity's party, Bob and Abby do the twist, act a bit like stoners, and for some reason end up trying to break bricks alongside a karate master. Serling's performance isn't bad, but the entire scene's sound mix is deafened by loud music in the background. At episode's end, the writer threatens to sue the series' protagonist for writing about his personal life in the paper but ends up conceding that it's good writing.
The same couldn't be said of the show itself. "Ichabod and Me" was canceled after a single season, though the lengthy season orders of the '60s meant it still got to air 36 episodes. The series is largely forgotten now, even as other early works of Serlings are studied by TV scholars and compiled in the Criterion Collection. I don't think we'll be seeing "Ichabod and Me" marathons on MeTV anytime soon.