The Med-School Reject Who Created ‘Gilligan’s Island’ and ‘The Brady Bunch’

With no Jewish holidays coming up immediately, we bring you profiles of some well known and some not so well known Jews. Enjoy.

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.