A new book on sitcoms shows how the late Sherwood Schwartz, N.J. Jew in L.A., invented the modern high-concept comedy
By Saul Austerlitz for Tablet Magazine
Sherwood
Schwartz, a well-regarded young television writer in the early 1960s,
had pitched a show about seven desert-island castaways trapped together
to his longtime agent in Hollywood and got an unexpectedly virulent
answer: “Sherwood, you’re out of your fucking mind. Who the hell is
going to watch the same goddamn seven people on the same goddamn island
every week?”Schwartz changed agents and wrote out 31 two-to-three-sentence story ideas on a long roll of butcher paper he tacked up in his office and brought the roll into his next meeting. While CBS bought the show almost immediately, network president Jim Aubrey was insistent that it required far too much explanation of its guiding premise each week to make sense to viewers. Schwartz believed otherwise: His goal was to find a setup that would force disparate characters together without anyone being able to leave. “All my shows, actually, are how do people learn to get along with each other?” he would later note.
Aubrey’s objections, Schwartz insisted, would be solved by the show’s introductory theme song: He originally had a Harry Belafonte–inspired calypso rhythm in mind but was ultimately convinced to abandon it in favor of the sea-chantey style of the final version, which introduced the five passengers, the three-hour tour, and the tiny ship that got tossed. And so Gilligan’s Island was born.
Schwartz was born in 1916 in Passaic, N.J.—a wool town just over from the silk-producing city of Paterson. His parents had lost two children before Sherwood, and his father, a grocer, went broke during the Depression. Sherwood’s older brother Al was dead-set on becoming a writer, but his parents insisted he attend law school. Al passed the bar exam, handed his mother his diploma, then said, “Here, now I can write.”
Continue reading.
Want to know more about other influential Jews? Follow our board
page. 
I
met Jackie Mason for the first time a few months ago at the kosher
Great American Health Bar on West 57th Street in Manhattan. My friend
Mike Fiorito went up to him and told him a joke. “What kind of a shmuck
tells me a joke?” Mason said. I introduced myself and gave him my card. A
month later he called me. We’ve been shmoozing together ever since.
According
to the biblical Book of Ruth, Ruth was a Moabite woman who married into
an Israelite family and eventually converted to Judaism. She is the
great-grandmother of King David and hence an ancestor of the Messiah.