Say what you will about “Gilligan’s Island,” but the critically derided 1960s sitcom knew its audience and pandered to them with buffoonish élan. Though that audience didn’t fully materialize until after the series’ cancellation in 1967, decades of successful syndication is all the proof you need to acknowledge that creator Sherwood Schwartz (who also brought together “The Brady Bunch”) was some kind of low-aiming visionary.
Those of us who blew countless hours of our childhood hanging with the castaways on that uncharted desert isle somewhere in the Pacific Ocean owe Schwartz a debt of gratitude. Watching Bob Denver’s Gilligan ineptly ensure that the Skipper (Alan Hale Jr.) and the passengers of the S.S. Minnow remain stranded on that tropical patch of earth made not doing chores and/or homework a brain-numbing joy. Yes, the jokes were awful and the plots shamelessly recycled, but there was something strangely compelling about Schwartz’s dramatis personae. For many, the Howells (Jim Backus and Natalie Schafer), the Professor (Russell Johnson), Mary Ann (Dawn Wells), and Ginger (Tina Louise) became defining sitcom archetypes.
And this all worked to the embarrassingly effective extent that it did because Schwartz nailed the casting. But he had some intriguing options before settling on the above-mentioned actors. In fact, he nearly gave one of film and television’s most beloved jerks (onscreen, not off) his big break.
Professor Dabney Coleman?
When Dabney Coleman passed away last May at the age of 92, his peers and fans fondly recalled an enormously gifted character actor who could get audiences sneering just by walking in front of the camera. Whether he was playing a horrifically sexist boss in “9 to 5,” an emotionally abusive soap opera director in “Tootsie,” or an abrasive NORAD engineer in “WarGames,” we loved to jeer Coleman.
But there was a winningly tender side to Coleman as well. Though the film was a box office failure, those of us who wasted loads of time watching HBO in the 1980s (it couldn’t always be “Gilligan’s Island”) adored him as the ultra-capable superspy Jack Flack in “Cloak & Dagger.” And this aspect of Coleman’s personality might not have come as such a surprise had we gotten to know him as the Professor.
According to his obituary by The Hollywood Reporter, Coleman was up for the part made famous by Russell Johnson during the casting of the pilot. Coleman was beat out not by Johnson, but Jack Gabriel. Schwartz wound up replacing Gabriel with Johnson when “Gilligan’s Island” went to series, but it’s a fun little what if to ask how the film world might’ve been different had Coleman found fame in this silly sitcom. Most of the actors in “Gilligan’s Island” were typecast thereafter, so it’s possible Coleman might’ve never played any of those memorable roles.
Had showbiz history played out just a little differently, we might be talking up Russell Johnson as one of his generation’s greatest onscreen a**holes.
