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Couldn't there have been a season 4 with creative scheduling?


We lost a season 4 of GI just because the wife of the CBS head liked Gunsmoke. God knows 20+ years of that isn't enough! Don't you think if they were creative with the schedule they could've kept Gilligan's Island AND Gunsmoke?

Jesus NEVER existed! He is Judeo Christian MYTH!

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I will go to my grave saying this...
GUNSMOE WAS A GODEND!

with the beginning of season 4 would come:

Ginger gets not only off the island, but doesn't send back help for anyone else. she doesn't die, she just gets off. whatabitch!

With the loss of Ginger we get two ladies -- Miss Kristy and Miss Sally -- are they preschool teachers? Librarians? what is with the Miss crap?

you have the run of the mill mishaps -- Modern day pirates, GIlligan thinking he is dick Tracy, 'Uncle Arthur' swings by and tells jokes...

then you have the crap that is purely from Hannah Barbara: My Favorite Alien": A silly alien lands on the island. and "Proportional Potions": Gilligan finds a drink which makes him miniaturized. not to mention Gilligan's dinosaur.

what the eff, Sherwood???

Oh God. Fortune vomits on my eiderdown once more.

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It was stated that the Miss Kristy and Miss Sally script would have most likely been rejected by the CBS bosses.
More than likely, Sherwood Schwartz would have been forced to recast the role of Ginger Grant. (If it ain't broken, why fix?) CBS did the same thing two years earlier on The Munsters when Pat Priest took over from Bev Owen as Marilyn Munster. And two years later over on ABC, Bewitched did the same thing by replacing Dick York with Dick Sargent as Darrin Stephens.
Tina Louise never came back for any of the Gilligan's Island reunion films and all they did was simply recast the role. It's done all the time on soap operas and Broadway shows.
The other scripts did feel like Gilligan's Island and I believe they would have probably been filmed had the series been renewed for a fourth season.

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If you look at the 1967-1968 TV schedule...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967%E2%80%9368_United_States_network_television_schedule
...you'll see that CBS had very few half hour comedies that weren't in the Top 30.

The half hour slots that were out of the top 30 were Hogan Heroes (which would last utill 1971), Petticoat Junction (which would last until 1970), and He & She and Good Morning World (both of which were kind of ahead of their time, but lasted only one season). Except for "Hogan's Heroes," which started at 9:00 PM, the three other shows started at 9:30 PM, which is really too late for a show like "Gilligan's Island."

They could have shifted one of their half hour slots earlier, but they also had to take into account how that would affect their success against other shows on that night. Juggling the whole schedule just because Bill Paley's wife liked "Gunsmoke" was probably not an option.

As I mentioned, "He & She" and "Good Morning World" were the only new half hour comedies on CBS in 1967. Both were attempts at more sophisticated comedy, à la "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and the later "Mary Tyler Moore Show," so it would be hard to see William Paley sinking them to save Gilligan. Notice that they were not willing to just put "Gunsmoke" into one of those slots and leave "Gilligan" alone.

One possibility would have been to ditch the new "Gentle Ben," which aired at 7:30 on Sunday - a perfect spot for Gilligan. As it turned out. "Gentle Ben" got very good rating in its first year, but was gone after its second.

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They could run the show in a different timeslot.

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They could have done a 13 episode thing and kept it as a mid-season replacement, but I'm not sure if that was done back then.

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