In this show the producers took on the task of adapting a 1945 romantic novel and its 1947 movie adaptation, about a lovely but independent-minded young widow and the ghost of an alternately crusty, shrewd, playfully humorous, commanding, and roguishly charming 19th century sea captain whose former house she leases, to a late 1960's network television half-hour sitcom. To put that in perspective, it started the same year as LAUGH-IN and the year after THE SMOTHERS BROTHERS. All-color network prime-time TV was only a year or two old. The president was a guy named Lyndon Johnson who shocked everybody when at the last minute he announced he decided to pass up running for one more term in office, while the country's little kids were more taken with asking their parents what it was going to be like when the astronauts finally got to the moon. Meanwhile, back on Earth, the Credibility Gap (actually pawkily referenced in one episode) was in full swing and any viewing of the evening network TV news would convince anybody that we were looking at The End of Western Civilization As We Know It (". . . and that's the way it is . . . "). The times, they were a-changin', and that was the hurdle the makers of this show sought to straddle for the two seasons and 50 episodes it was produced.
One challenge to overcome was taking what in novel and movie form was a discrete drama with a beginning, middle, and end (all played out in about an hour-and-a-half or so, total) and turn it into an essentially never-ending 1960's-style comedy with no end but a whole lot of middle lasting just as long as they could secure renewals for new seasons, and all broken up into 23-minute bites. This naturally entailed some very basic changes to the original format. Two in particular come to mind.
The original was a tightly-written traditional story focusing on the two main characters (i.e., The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, themselves) and their perpetually unrequited, unrequitable romance (or so it would seem), with supporting characters employed only for the purpose of assisting as needed the development of that plot line. But for weekly, endlessly recurring TV in 1968, where the target was a mass broadcast audience of recurring viewers spanning literally from 6 to 60 (and them some, if you were only moderately optimistic), that formula was going to have to be altered, and so it was. The supporting characters took on greater roles and the whole thing began to take on more the nature of an ensemble, not entirely unlike a host of other offerings of the period ranging from Andy Griffith and The Beverly Hillbillies to Gilligan's Island and Green Acres.
This meant that the ongoing bitter-sweet romance and battle-of-the-sexes dynamic that dominated the original became noticeably diluted with stories about lost dogs, meddling relatives (the merest subplot in the original), trouble in school and the little league, and all the usual soft-core fare of any 1960's family sitcom. The end result was too frequently not all that different from BEWITCHED, which boiled down to supernatural magic powers being imposed to solve the mere mortals' problem-of-the-week with the twitch of a hand (or other appendage), with the role of the supernatural captain largely limited to that. In the process, there was a lot of the sillier pratfall-based comedy and other tropes that were standard devices of the TV sitcoms of the era, and these look as dated as the rotary-dial telephones (to say nothing of the pastels and plaid costumes) in comparison with, say, FRASIER, SEINFELD, or CHEERS. A fair amount of classic stereotyped New England local color humor also became evident, and the very silly largely physical comedy of Charles Nelson Reilly, in the guise of the modern owner of the captain's house, became prominent. Indeed, they even threw a trained dog act into the mix. Thus, only some episodes managed to stay dedicated to the core story here, that of the personal relationship of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, while the writers, with apparent awareness of the task they were faced with, strove mightily to always weave that dynamic into whatever else they found themselves about throughout the first season. Regrettably, with a move from the NBC television network to ABC for the second season, the captain's role most often came to be rather marginalized and whenever that happened the romantic angle seemed to disappear entirely, with Mrs. Muir taking on classic 1960's TV mom form -- albeit with a not-insignificant twist.
For the other major change they made is especially notable and particularly central to the themes the show explored. The original is set in England, opening in the year 1900 or so, on the cusp of the Victorian and Edwardian eras (Edwardian was just Victorian with newfangled gadgets like Wright-Brothers-style aeroplanes, cars like Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, gramophones, very early movie pictures without sound, and the TITANIC), and ends probably in that same year 1945 when the book was published. On the other hand, the TV version is contemporary America right up to the minute (or as contemporary as you can get in a quaint New England coastal village), right down to transistor radios, the 25-inch television set in the living room, and the inevitable 1969 Dodge station wagon parked out front.
More to the point is what happened to Mrs. Muir. The crux of the character was always that of a "high-spirited", independent woman (and it is this characteristic that sets up her relationship with The Captain -- she has "spunk"!), but how that comes off looking when viewed through the lens of the year 2021 is-- well, prophetic in the extreme. She comes off largely as a classic 1960's TV mom, but on steroids, powerfully presaging where women's roles would be going in decades hence. With the addition of two little kids with significant parts in the show, their dog, various repairmen and vendors seeing to the now 100-year-old cottage, and most especially the world's most archetypically terminally cheap, avaricious, petty, self-important, and craven landlord, the TV Mrs. Muir takes on less the romantic aura of angelic beauty radiating from a gilded pedestal that was central to the Victorianesque original, and more the surprisingly realistic exasperation of a professionally talented and respected but perpetually harassed single mother trying to pay never-ending bills, make a living, pick up kids from school, tend to her career, keep the dog fed, be active in her community, and not the least, constantly battle the landlord. These matters are by no means incidental to the show, but are central to very many of the plotlines.
Even more, the dynamic between the two main characters becomes a vehicle to show the basic contrast between Victorian formality and mores that, while beginning to fade, were still inherent in American society in the 1960's, and the changes in mores and values among the more contemporarily-oriented members of society that were taking hold at that time. In this the series concept was extremely timely; in fact, so timely, that this aspect by itself may well have been the element that suggested bringing this story to television in the year 1968 in the first place. With various voices then seeking "social relevance" in television, this settup was perfect for the era. Thus, the battle-of-the-sexes dynamic developed in this series is not just Him versus Her, but Victorian Him versus Modern Her, contrasting not just the sexes, but also two different values systems in conflict at the time the series was made (and to some extent to this very day). And, much as in all the other TV other series addressing this kind of culture clash at that time, in any given story the conflict between the traditionalist and the more modern character is resolved with the more old-fashioned character winding up modernizing His attitude about whatever the subject of that story was by the time you get to its end, while in this show the Modern Woman will often get to experience the charm of some of His more traditional conceptions.
Thus, while the Captain's character is admirably reprised here by Edward Mulhare as practically a carbon-copy of the original essayed by no less a worthy than Rex Harrison (who once played, for example, Julius Caesar opposite Elizabeth Taylor), Hope Lange acted her way to two Emmy Awards with her portrayal of this now all-too-familiar female archetype beginning two full years before the creators of the MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW could start publicly patting themselves on the back for their "groundbreaking" show about the young, childless Mary Richards "making it on her own" and accidentally showing a little "spunk" to her own crusty boss in 1970. It was was fully seven years ahead of Bonnie Franklin and ONE DAY AT A TIME which was similarly billed as groundbreaking on the subject of single-motherhood on American TV. This is something for which surely this series has never gotten the attention it deserves. Moreover, while the main male characters can be summed up with a handful of select adjectives each, her character comes off to as practically as mysterious as any woman I have ever been attracted to. Perhaps it is a basic flaw in the writing (or perhaps it is writing that is just TOO realistic), but after two years of episodes, I still don't feel like I really know Mrs. Muir.
The bottom line here is that this was a show with a premise with a lot of promise, with often notable execution by the standards of its time, and as such has attracted its own little dedicated fan base over 50 years later (there is even at least one fan page for it on Facebook), and any fan of the television of that era would do well not to pass this up. (Given the changes in emphasis found between the two seasons, probably the best way to view this series, once the new viewer has plowed through the episodes in chronological order on a first screening, is to watch them by alternating between seasons thereafter.)
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