Women's Health April 12, 2026 0 Comments

Unlocking Sherwood Schwartz’s Forgotten Masterpiece: The Lost TV Series That Bridges ‘Gilligan’s Island’ and ‘The Brady Bunch’—And Why It Could Change Everything You Thought About Classic TV!

When you hear Gilligan’s Island or The Brady Bunch, you probably picture those timeless, cozy sitcoms that somehow snagged a spot in the heart of TV history—shows as simple as pie but with a charm that’s lasted for decades. Both creations of Sherwood Schwartz, no less. But hold up—what about that rogue middle child in Schwartz’s sitcom family? That quirky, one-season wonder crashing the party: It’s About Time. It might not have bulldozed ratings or won Emmy gold, but it dared to push boundaries between astronauts and cavemen, a mash-up so bold it flirts with being either brilliantly ahead of its time or just wildly out of sync. Ever wonder what it’d be like to toss futuristic space dudes into a world of clubs and caves? Well, that’s exactly the gig here. And just when you think you’ve got the handle on it, the show flips the script—cavemen hit the ’60s scene, culture shock style. Yep, it’s this strange, fascinating in-between that kinda test-drives Schwartz’s winning formula of throwing wildly different people together and seeing what happens when they can’t get away from each other. But did he push that idea too far? That’s the million-dollar question. Stick around, because we’re diving deep into the saga of It’s About Time, chronicling its curious legacy from the voices who knew Schwartz best. LEARN MORE

When people think of Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch, they’re thinking of two of the most durable sitcom concepts ever put on television—shows built on simple, almost deceptively modest premises that somehow translated into decades of cultural longevity. While both were created by Sherwood Schwartz, what tends to get lost in that legacy is the show that came in between—a single-season experiment that, depending on who you talk to, was either ahead of its time or simply out of sync with it. That was the TV series It’s About Time.

Premiering on CBS in the fall of 1966 (joining shows like Star Trek, Batman and Family Affair), It’s About Time starred Frank Aletter and Jack Mullaney as astronauts Mac McKenzie and Hector Canfield, whose experimental spaceflight sends them hurtling back to prehistoric times, where they find themselves trying to survive among a tribe of cavemen led by Joe E. Ross and Imogene Coca. Week after week, the comedy grew out of that culture clash—modern men armed with science and logic suddenly forced to navigate a world of clubs, caves and very different rules.

Midway through its single season, the show flipped its premise, bringing the cavemen into present-day America, but whether set in the distant past or the swinging ’60s, the series remained a curious, high-concept entry in Schwartz’ body of work—one that fans who remember it tend to recall with a certain affection, even if it never quite found the footing of the shows that surrounded it.

And like the shows that bracket it, It’s About Time was rooted in creator Sherwood Schwartz’s central storytelling philosophy: take wildly different people, trap them together and let the comedy—and conflict—play out from there. The difference is that this time, Schwartz may have pushed that idea just a little too far.

To capture the moment—and explain why the TV series It’s About Time still gets talked about nearly 60 years later—we’re telling its story as an oral history, in the words of the people who knew Sherwood Schwartz best.

CBS wanted another hit

LLOYD J. SCHWARTZ (son of Sherwood Schwartz; producer): “I think the show was a request from CBS because Gilligan was a hit and they wanted more from Sherwood Schwartz. And so he did this. Dad always talked about the fact that he felt that it didn’t work, mostly because we hadn’t yet landed on the moon. And the idea of these astronauts going back in time was something he thought was just kind of not in the public consciousness, so maybe if it happened a little later, it might’ve been more successful.”

GEOFFREY MARK (pop culture historian; friend of Sherwood Schwartz): “Sherwood wanted another show because there was already a problem with the financial bookkeeping on Gilligan’s Island, which had premiered two years earlier. His joke is when you have a hit show, you need a second hit show, because the second hit show will pay for the attorneys to fight with the studio for the profits from the first show. That’s why Sherwood created It’s About Time.”

The Sherwood Schwartz formula

LLOYD J. SCHWARTZ: “Dad had one theme he worked with. It’s the same theme as Brady and Gilligan, and also It’s About Time, where he wanted to take people from different places and put them together so they couldn’t get away from each other, and they had to need each other to survive. And in this case, you can’t take people who were more further apart from each other than a modern scientist and astronaut and cavemen, put them together and see what happens.”

GEOFFREY MARK: “Sherwood had a habit of creating shows that were very, very premise-heavy. You know, putting people in very small places and let’s see what happens with them. In Gilligan’s Island, it’s seven people on an island. In The Brady Bunch, it’s a man with three boys and a woman with three girls and a housekeeper. In It’s About Time, it’s astronauts and cavemen. The premise is the star of the show.”

LLOYD J. SCHWARTZ: “You never want to satirize stuff if the truth hasn’t been established yet. Like I said, we hadn’t landed on the moon, so the idea of astronauts was still kind of abstract for the audience. It wasn’t real in the way that it would become later.”

GEOFFREY MARK: “When It’s About Time was being put together, and this is something that people forget, the biggest thing in this country were the Gemini rocket launches of these two astronauts circling the globe. The whole world stopped. Every time they launched one, television stopped. It was a really big deal. So in Sherwood’s mind, he was tapping into something very current, but the problem is that what was current didn’t necessarily translate into comedy.”

Where it fell apart

GEOFFREY MARK: “It’s About Time wasn’t really a situation comedy. It was a live cartoon and it didn’t have the grounding that you need for a sitcom. These people never really became characters. They were just placemarks, existing to service the premise and not to live in it. Frank Aletter, who I got to know, couldn’t believe how bad the scripts were. He said it gave the actors only the most superficial things to do and there was nothing to play. And when there’s nothing to play, there’s nothing for an audience to connect to. The show was lousy, but it was a paycheck. And that’s not a great place to be creatively.”

LLOYD J. SCHWARTZ: “When it wasn’t really catching on, and it was not a big hit, they decided to move it from the caveman time. The astronauts go back in the capsule and land in the present with cavemen. As a result, the cavemen become the fish out of water as opposed to the astronauts.”

GEOFFREY MARK: “At that point, the show becomes like The Munsters or The Addams Family with people who don’t really belong where they are. It was very derivative of things that were already on the air, so instead of being original, it became familiar in a way that didn’t help it.”

Dinosaurs, dialogue and chaos

IT'S ABOUT TIME, Joe E. Ross, (June 1966), 1966-67. — IT’S ABOUT TIME, Joe E. Ross, (June 1966), 1966-67.Ken Whitmore / TV Guide / Courtesy Everett Collection

LLOYD J. SCHWARTZ: “My job on the show was as a dialogue coach, which was kind of weird because it was a dialogue coach for cavemen. So we do a lot of grunting and figuring out how cavemen would communicate. It was kind of ridiculous, but it was also kind of fun. And then, when they’d see a dinosaur, that was always me on a ladder they’d look up at and I’d be waving like the dinosaur until footage was cut in. That was the special effect.”

Dialogue became a bit of a problem in that Imogene Coco’s character’s name was Shag, Sherwood Schwartz being unaware that British slang for the word referred to sex. This meant that things had to be dubbed so that Shag became Shad.

LLOYD J. SCHWARTZ: “Joe E. Ross and Imogene were a match unmade in heaven. They just didn’t click the way you would hope.”

GEOFFREY MARK: “Joe E. Ross was a very strange man. He knew how to be funny, but he didn’t know how to live outside of that. That made things difficult, because comedy is a rhythm and if someone is off rhythm, it affects everything. Another problem is that the set was small—it was one soundstage—so there was nothing you could do to change from one episode to the next. It all started to feel the same. But I will say that the failure of It’s About Time helped make The Brady Bunch a better show. I think Sherwood learned from these mistakes that character had to come first. That you couldn’t just rely on premise.”

The element that endured

IT'S ABOUT TIME, Imogene Coca, 1966-67 — IT’S ABOUT TIME, Imogene Coca, 1966-67Courtesy the Everett Collection

There is one inescapable contribution that It’s About Time made to the pop culture landscape: its theme song (which can be heard in the video above).

GEOFFREY MARK: “Oh, Baby Boomers definitely remember the theme song. The theme song may be the most memorable part of the whole show.”

LLOYD J. SCHWARTZ: “Dad wrote that. He wrote the theme for Brady and also for Gilligan. That was one of his great gifts, being able to encapsulate the entire show in that opening song.”

GEOFFREY MARK: “Despite the fact that it didn’t connect, we’re still talking about it. And that says something. It says that even when something doesn’t work, it can still be part of the conversation.”

Quick Facts about ‘It’s About Time’ and Sherwood Schwartz

IT'S ABOUT TIME, Jack Mullaney, (June 1966), 1966-67. — IT’S ABOUT TIME, Jack Mullaney, (June 1966), 1966-67.Ken Whitmore / TV Guide / Courtesy Everett Collection

It’s About Time premiered in 1966, right between Sherwood Schwartz’s two biggest hits—Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch—making it a true “middle child” in the lineage of classic TV.
Before he created Gilligan’s Island and later created The Brady Bunch, Schwartz built his reputation writing for radio and early television, including work on The Red Skelton Show and projects tied to Armed Forces Radio.
Like many sitcoms of the era, It’s About Time was a high-concept television series that leaned heavily on its premise—something Schwartz would refine in later TV series successes.
The show starred Frank Aletter and Jack Mullaney as astronauts, alongside cavemen played by Joe E. Ross, Imogene Coca and Cliff Norton.
Coca, already well known from Your Show of Shows and other appearances, brought a seasoned comedic presence to the otherwise broad, almost cartoon-like tone of the series.
The premise—astronauts stranded in prehistoric times—arrived during a wave of fantasy sitcoms that included shows like My Favorite Martian and Bewitched, all of which blended the everyday with the absurd.
Midway through its run, the show reversed its concept, bringing the cavemen into modern-day America—a move that echoed fish-out-of-water comedies dating back to The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet era domestic storytelling, but with a sci-fi twist.
Though the series lasted only one season, Schwartz produced it during a remarkably prolific period of his career, working out of Los Angeles, where much of classic television history was being made.
In retrospect, It’s About Time remains one of the more unusual entries in the catalog Schwartz produced—an ambitious swing that didn’t connect with audiences in the same way as the series Gilligan’s Island or The Brady Bunch, but one that clearly informed what came next.