Television sitcom from the very late
1960s about a "
cool"
photographer /
widower raising his son in
Honolulu,
Hawaii, with the aid of a young
japanese housekeeper, very loosely based on the 1963 movie of the same name. The houskeeper,
Mrs. Livingston (
Miyoshi Umeki) was the image of
stability and dispenser of
wisdom with an
eastern twist that was new and alien to most of the
baby boomers in the audience.
Bill Bixby was the the father of Eddie (
Brandon Cruz), and Mrs. Livingston
always addressed Eddie's dad as "Mr. Eddie's Father". The
relationship between "Mr. Eddie's Father" and Mrs. Livingston was strictly
platonic, though the
subtext was always there, despite his
skirt chasing, which was featured in every episode.
This show could well have been one of the last sitcoms that didn't focus on drawing
comdey from the
conflicts between the characters, instead using the
misunderstandings that arose naturally as the characters each
learned about the (new) world as the comedic engine. There were around this time a few other sitcoms which also featured
single parent households that relied on an outside helper of some sort. Considering the concurrent start of the
collapse of the
nuclear family leads one into a
chicken/egg problem.