Broadside (TV series)


Broadside is an American sitcom that aired on ABC during the 1964–1965 TV season. The series, produced by McHale's Navy creator Edward Montagne, starred Kathleen Nolan, formerly of The Real McCoys.

Synopsis

The series centered on the women of the Navy on "a supply base somewhere in the South Pacific, 1944," who found themselves transferred to the island of Ranakai to run the motorpool in an otherwise all-male environment. Lt. Anne Morgan was in command of the man-crazy, wisecracking Selma Kowalski, the alternately chipper and worried Molly McGuire, the slow-witted blonde and former exotic dancer Roberta Love, and the unit's only male recruit, Marion Botnik, assigned to the WAVES due to a clerical error.
Their nemesis was the rarefied Commander Roger Adrian, who regarded the war as a major intrusion on his idyllic, luxurious lifestyle; he felt that the WAVES experiment would attract official government supervision, endangering his private paradise. Adrian and his easily flustered junior officer Ensign Beasley constantly conspired to get rid of the WAVES, while executive officer Lt. Max Trotter and streetwise sailor Nicky D'Angelo sided with the girls in their counter-attacks on Adrian. Completing the ensemble was Adrian's fussy personal chef Bernard.
Edward Andrews had appeared in producer Edward Montagne's military sitcom The Phil Silvers Show. Montagne remembered him and co-starred him in Broadside. "The amusing thing is that Ed Montagne first offered me the Captain Binghamton role in his McHale's Navy and I turned him down," said Andrews in 1965. "After seeing what a wonderful job Joe Flynn is doing with the role, I keep kicking myself for what was apparently a stupid decision. is roughly a distaff version of McHale's Navy. One reason I grabbed onto this series is that finally, I hope, I'll get an identity with exposure every week in the same role."
Broadside boasted clever scripts and good direction by the McHale's Navy staff, and enthusiastic performances by the ensemble cast. As it was a rule that vehicles on set could only be operated by union members, the cast playing drivers got honorary Teamsters’ cards.
Edward Montagne had produced movie short subjects starring comedian Arnold Stang in the early 1950s. Montagne recruited Stang to join the series and offered him co-star billing. Stang was then co-starring with the national touring company of the Broadway hit A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and left the show on October 3, 1964 to join Montagne. "I was originally scheduled to be in the show when it went on the air last fall," recalled Stang in 1965, "but I was tied up with the road show of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. I couldn't get out of the commitment until now." Stang appeared midway through the Broadside run, having missed the first 21 episodes, and he replaced both Richard Jury and Don Edmonds in the ensemble cast. He co-starred in the remaining 11 episodes as outspoken master chef Stanley Stubbs, reunited with his high-school classmate Selma of the WAVES motorpool.
The ratings improved considerably with Stang aboard, but too late to save the series, which had already been canceled. Stang felt responsible: "By helping that show I messed it up for the entire cast. The ratings began to climb and they told us we'd probably be on next season. So everybody waited for the renewal, and when it didn't come the pilot season was over and they were all through for the year."
The executives at Universal Studios felt the tropical exteriors being used by Broadside and McHale's Navy—and nothing else—were taking up too much space on the backlot, so Broadside was canceled and the setting for McHale's Navy was changed to Italy, which could be shot on the studio's more frequently used sets with European facades. Arnold Stang did not appear in the last two episodes of the network run; ABC had pre-empted the show twice, and these shelved episodes with departed co-star Don Edmonds were burned off to finish the run.

Cast