📺 🎸 ❤️The Monkees Season 1 📺 🎸 ❤️ The Monkees Season 2 📺 🎸 ❤️
📺 🎸 ❤️ Daydream Believers: The Monkees Story 📺 🎸 ❤️
Do you have a fondness for root beer soup? Are your eyes like cupcakes, floating in a sea of sour cream? Have you ever found your feet on backwards? If so, then this episode guide is for you! Welcome to Monkees A La Episode: The Ultimate Monkees Episode Guide: a fun, yet vaguely factual, episode by episode guide of the The Monkees TV Show.
The Monkees TV show is owned by Rhino/Time Warner. If you would like to purchase The Monkees TV series, it is currently available on Blu-Ray on the Rhino/Time Warner store: The Monkees Complete TV Series Blu-Ray. Thank you to Sunshine Factory for the transcribed scripts and screen shots used for all of this artwork!
The Monkees TV show created the beginning of The Monkees: an originally fictional band who halfway through the TV series became a real life band, in a phantasmagoric life imitating art wonder.
Created and produced by Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider for NBC in the late 60s, The Monkees portrays a fictionalized American pop and rock band comprised of Michael Nesmith, Peter Tork, Micky Dolenz, and Davy Jones. Together, they live on the beach in southern California, trying to make it as a band and carve out a life different than their parents’ generation. With their long hair, groovy clothes, friendly, unconventional attitude, and communal, carefree lifestyle in their ramshackle California beach house, The Monkees portray an emerging subculture of young people who value artistic expression over materialistic acquisitions. The members often find themselves in bizarre comedic situations, zany, madcap adventures, unexpected romance, and morally challenging quandaries, much of the plots circling around their awkward shortcomings, lack of success, financial difficulties, and entanglements with square, older adult adversaries. The morals of the episodes include valuing their fraternity over selfish agendas, maintaining one’s character in moralistically gray areas, being true to ones self, valuing authenticity over superficiality, and not being seduced by greed in the material world. The Monkees charming, down-to-earth charisma, earnest nature, vulnerability, and entertaining, brotherly dialogue make their often over-the-top, only-in-the-60s-is-this-normal-television plots seem relatable, everyday, and connect with a range of viewers.
The Monkees first aired on NBC September 12, 1966, and ran for two seasons, the last episode airing March 25, 1968. The show won two Emmy Awards in 1967, for Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Comedy. The series was later re-aired on CBS from September 1969 to September 1972, on ABC from September 1972 to August 1973, then sold into syndication in 1975. It has since been aired on MTV, Nick At Nite, Antenna TV, and many other networks, and has been released on VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray, making this series accessible to multiple generations of fans.
The concept for The Monkees was heavily inspired by the trending zeitgeist of free-spirited American and British Invasion bands and counter-culture life of the mid-to-late-1960s. Counter-culture had previously been viewed as dangerous during the radical socials shifts of the 1960s, and prior to The Monkees, adult men on television were only seen as wholesome and good if they played roles such as breadwinner husbands in heteronormative, nuclear families. The Monkees provided an alternative portrayal of what young adult life could look like, showing that young men who are not yet ready to settle down could live together in an alternative lifestyle and still be as wholesome and good as their square, nuclear family male counterparts. The Monkees are portrayed as young, artistic, creative misfits, who may have prioritized being in a band over starting a family, but who also wanted to live peacefully and be happy, just like everyone else. The four men may have often been referred to on the show as “long-haired weirdos”, but they weren’t starting riots or burning down buildings, they were helping vulnerable people keep their jobs and businesses and not be taken advantage of by scoundrels, rescuing damsels in distress, and working with the police and CIA to catch criminals. “We’re just trying to be friendly,” the Monkees theme song says, “come and watch us sing and play.”
“Which is probably the legacy, or would be one of the legacies,” as Micky Dolenz said in a recent Cheat Sheet interview, “making it OK to have long hair and bell-bottoms in 1966. Because at that time, the only time you saw long-haired kids with bell-bottoms, they were being arrested!”
The Monkees were as musically talented as they were funny, making for a dazzlingly entertaining series. But it also didn’t hurt that The Monkees were four very attractive men. The Monkees conventionally appealing features made their unconventional Beatles-style haircuts and rebellious, hippie-style clothing easier for the older generation to digest. Showing off The Monkees good looks was as important as showing off their musical and acting talents: clothing was carefully chosen to be both trendy and flattering, and the Monkees hairstylists made more money per week than the Monkees themselves did. The Monkees were marketed as adorable, non-threatening, boy-next door heartthrobs, and soon they were on the cover of every 60s teen magazine: 16, Tiger Beat, Flip, Hit Parader, Hullabaloo just to name a few. Tiger Beat even created it’s own offshoot, Monkees Spectacular.
All of this made The Monkees instantly alluring for the young, teeny-bopper generation to fall in love with. The Monkees were four unwed men: this meant four eligible bachelors in the eyes of what would become The Monkees largest target audience: coming-of-age women. During the radical social shifts of the 1960s, gender roles were questioned, challenged, experimented with, and even reversed. This was so prominent in the mid-to-late 1960s, it became one of the on going jokes on The Monkees, in both the TV show and their music. A clip from the show, “BORIS: A teenager just stopped me and wanted a date. MADAME: Teenage girls are very aggressive in this country. BORIS: It wasn’t a girl.“
After the rigidly defined culture of the post-war 1950s, where gender roles were very black and white, with men as the breadwinners and pursuers, and women the passive, domestic homemakers, the counter-culture 1960s was completely different–where women began to feel safe considering what they wanted sexually, and feeling societally supported. The first oral contraceptive pill was was approved by the FDA in 1960, and this greatly changed how safe and comfortable women felt sexually.
The late 1960s not only acknowledged the needs of adolescents, but was adolescent itself as a culture–like an awkward teenager that tries out a different personality every week, the late 60s was very much about trying out what felt right at that moment. In the late 1960s, this meant allowing women to feel they could acknowledge their own sexuality, and even pursue men. The Monkees allowed the four band members to be the objects of fantasy for women, for women to fantasize about pursuing the men, rather than viewing the men as the sexual pursuers. After the more sexually repressive mores of the mid-century, this was extremely daring, controversial, and ultimately life-altering.
Stylistically, The Monkees TV series was also daring and experimental for its time, which is what in part led to it becoming more than just a TV show and the members ultimately forming a real band. Creators Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider developed The Monkees with avant garde film techniques, such as breaking the fourth wall, jump cuts, and improvisation. Jokes, lines, and references were often sassy and rebellious, with double entendres referencing sex, drugs, or political controversy, pushing the envelope just as much as they could and still get past the NBC censors. The Monkees also used their real names in the show, which added to the verisimilitude and blurred the lines between fantasy and reality of the band. And, most importantly in the storyline of the real life Monkees, The Monkees had real music in the show, with each episode containing two songs, including song “romp”: a vignette of scenes that may have nothing to do with the episode, while one of The Monkees songs played along with it, a precursor to the later created music videos. These songs were as phenomenal as the show itself, and would become some of the greatest hits of the 1960s.
Where The Monkees music came from was the beginning of both The Monkees’ success and controversy. Renowned music producer Don Kirshner was hired by Bob and Bert to find the greatest songs and song-writers of the time. Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Neil Diamond, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, John Stewart, Harry Nilsson, David Gates, and Diane Hildebrand were among the phenomenal songwriters who wrote The Monkees earliest music, creating catchy pop songs which perfectly complimented the genuine yet light-hearted tone of the Monkees show.
However, in addition to Don Kirshner securing the songs themselves, he also secured the musicians who would be playing on those tracks. While all four of the actors chosen for The Monkees had a musical background of some kind, and it was earlier envisioned they would be collaborative in the musical process, ultimately session musicians were hired to create the music The Monkees would have their name on, with the four men only providing the vocals on the finished songs. While hiring session musicians for songs was not unheard of in the 1960s, with even successful, respected bands like The Beach Boys doing it, something about the way The Monkees did it really bothered people, and the show–the band?–became heavily criticized by the press. What’s more, the more musically driven members of the group, Michael and Peter, wanted to be playing on these tracks and have the band to creating the music themselves. So, ultimately, while Don Kirshener, “the man with the golden ear”, helped create The Monkees, he was fired so that The Monkees could become a real band, with musical producer Chip Douglas producing The Monkees music instead.
Bob Rafelson and Bert Schnieder were both creative visionaries. Bob was drafted into the US Army and stationed in Japan prior to creating The Monkees, which greatly influenced his work. While in Japan, Bob translated film from Japanese to English, worked as a disc jockey, and analyzed Japanese movies, “I’d have to watch an Ozu movie over and over again… I was hypnotized by the stillness of his frames, his sureness of composition… I suppose my own aesthetic evolved from looking at certain kinds of pictures.”[source] Bert Schnieder was working in Los Angeles at the time and joined with Bob to form RayBert Productions, and in addition to The Monkees, Bob and Bert are responsible for Five Easy Pieces, Easy Rider, and The Last Picture Show.
As Time magazine contributor James Poniewozik wrote upon reflecting on the death of Davy Jones in 2012, “Even if the show never meant to be more than entertainment and a hit-single generator, we shouldn’t sell The Monkees short. It was far better TV than it had to be; during an era of formulaic domestic sitcoms and wacky comedies, it was a stylistically ambitious show, with a distinctive visual style, absurdist sense of humor and unusual story structure. Whatever Jones and The Monkees were meant to be, they became creative artists in their own right, and Jones’ chipper Brit-pop presence was a big reason they were able to produce work that was commercial, wholesome and yet impressively weird.”
“Commercial, wholesome, and yet impressively weird”. I’ll take that.
🦋 Emily Wells