Classic TV Rewind · Episode 4
Two Darrins
Season 1, Bewitched. The most famous swap in sitcom history: Dick York's back injury and the years he played Darrin in pain, Dick Sargent finally getting the part, the change nobody explained, baby Adam, Esmeralda and why Aunt Clara was never recast, and the old scripts made new.
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Shannon September 1969. Bewitched is back for its sixth season. Same house. Same wife. Same mother-in-law, same nose twitch.
Carol And then Darrin walks in the front door. And he's a different man.
Shannon Not a spell. Not a magic trick. A different actor. And nobody on the show says a single word about it.
Carol Welcome to Classic TV Rewind, where we go back to the shows we grew up with, and find out what made them work.
Shannon This season, it's Bewitched. And this time, the most famous swap in sitcom history.
Carol Episode four. Two Darrins.
Shannon So, let's start with the first Darrin. Dick York.
Carol I loved him in the part.
Shannon A lot of people did. He played Darrin as a man always just a little bit out of breath. His eyes would go wide, his voice would crack, and you'd feel every bit of his panic.
Carol That double take.
Shannon Nobody did it better. And he and Elizabeth Montgomery really worked as a couple. You believed those two were in love, even while her family was turning him into a mule.
Carol So why did he leave?
Shannon It goes back to a movie he made ten years before Bewitched. In 1959, he was filming a western called They Came to Cordura, with Gary Cooper. During one scene, he and Gary Cooper were working the pump on a railway handcar, and another actor grabbed the handle just as he lifted. Suddenly he was lifting that man's whole weight, and the muscles in his back tore.
Carol Oh, no.
Shannon He was in pain from then on. Real, constant pain. And through all those years on Bewitched, he kept working through it. Some days, they built him a slanted board to lean on between takes. And some episodes were written so Darrin spent the whole time in bed or on the couch.
Carol And no one watching at home knew.
Shannon No one. And then, in January of 1969, during filming, he collapsed on the set. He never came back. The rest of season five was finished without him.
Carol That's so hard.
Shannon It was. But I want to say this. He played Darrin in a hundred and fifty-six episodes. In pain, for most of them. And you'd never know it from watching. That's a real professional.
Carol And then, the second Darrin.
Shannon Dick Sargent. And here's the funny part. Years before, when they were first casting the show, Dick Sargent had been one of the people they thought about for Darrin. But he'd already signed on for another sitcom, called Broadside, and the part went to Dick York.
Carol So he got it in the end.
Shannon He got it in the end. Five years late, but he got it.
Carol And how was he different?
Shannon A bit calmer. A bit more grown up, maybe. Where Dick York's Darrin would panic, Dick Sargent's Darrin would get annoyed. They're both very funny, just in different ways.
Carol And the show never explained it.
Shannon Never. Not one line. Darrin is just Darrin. Endora still can't remember his name, Larry still takes the credit, and Samantha still loves him.
Carol But they'd done that before, hadn't they?
Shannon They had. Remember Gladys Kravitz? Alice Pearce played her first, and then Sandra Gould. And Larry's wife, Louise Tate, was played by Irene Vernon for two seasons, and then by Kasey Rogers. Each time, a new face walked in, and nobody on the show said a word.
Carol Which is kind of perfect, really.
Shannon It is. Endora never got his name right anyway. Why should the audience?
Carol And people still argue about it.
Shannon Oh, they do. Ask any Bewitched fan, Dick York or Dick Sargent, and you'll get an answer in about half a second.
Carol And what's yours?
Shannon I'm a Dick York person. That nervous energy is hard to beat. But I'll say this for Dick Sargent. He walked into a hit show, in a part everybody already knew, with no explanation at all, and he made it his own. That's not easy.
Carol Dick York for me, too. Nobody could panic quite like him. But you're right, Dick Sargent had the harder job.
Shannon He really did.
Carol And season six wasn't only about Darrin, was it?
Shannon No. A lot happened that year. To start with, Samantha has another baby.
Carol A boy this time.
Shannon That's right. Adam. And just like with Tabitha, the big question is whether he takes after his mother. Only this time, Darrin has had some practice worrying.
Carol And the timing was real.
Shannon It was. Elizabeth Montgomery was expecting a baby of her own in 1969, her daughter Rebecca. So once again, the show wrote her pregnancy into the story.
Carol And then there's Esmeralda.
Shannon Oh, I love Esmeralda. She's a shy, nervous witch who comes to work as the family's housekeeper and babysitter. And whenever she gets flustered, she sneezes.
Carol And then something appears.
Shannon Every time. Food, animals, even a famous person from history. And when she's really nervous, she fades right out of sight. She means so well, and her magic goes wrong more often than not.
Carol She's a bit like Aunt Clara.
Shannon She is, in a way. The show had replaced Gladys, and Louise, and now Darrin. But Marion Lorne was irreplaceable. So Aunt Clara was never seen again. But that kind of witch, the sweet one whose magic never quite works, was too important to lose. So they found a way to bring her back, in Esmeralda. And she was played by Alice Ghostley, a wonderful comic actress with a lovely little quiver in her voice.
Carol And she was on the show before, wasn't she?
Shannon She was. Back in season two, she'd played a mortal maid, a very clumsy one, in another episode. And a few years later, she was back, this time as a witch.
Carol And I read that some of the stories in the later years were ones we'd already seen.
Shannon That's true. The show had been on a long time, and a number of the later episodes reused stories from the early years, with the new Darrin.
Carol So if you thought you'd seen it before.
Shannon You probably had. But fans have fun with that now. You can watch the Dick York version and the Dick Sargent version side by side, and see how each of them plays the same scene.
Carol So, what's your pick for the two Darrins?
Shannon Mine has to be a Dick York one. From his last season, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall. Samantha says Darrin doesn't have a vain bone in his body, so Endora puts a spell on him, and he becomes the most conceited man in the world. He holds up traffic admiring himself in the car mirror. Dick York is wonderful in it.
Carol And mine is And Something Makes Four. That's the episode where Adam is born. Darrin is a nervous wreck, Maurice puts a spell on the baby, and it's very sweet.
Shannon And our ratings, out of five twitches?
Carol For the two Darrins? Four twitches. It's a different show by now, but it's still a good one.
Shannon Four from me too. And one extra twitch for Dick York, for every scene he played in pain.
Shannon That's the story of the two Darrins. A man with a bad back who kept going, a man who waited five years for the part, and a show that never said a word about it.
Carol Next time, our last episode of the season. Bewitched goes to Salem, says goodbye, and lives on, in reruns, in a movie, and in a statue.
Shannon That's next time, on Classic TV Rewind.