What kind of band earns two Emmys, but never a single Grammy? The Monkees wouldn't
have existed were it not for another rock band being tied up in legal limitations.
Who almost got the gig? Keep watching to find out.
"The Monkees" was the brainchild of television producer Bob Rafelson,
who wanted to create a show based on his own experiences as a musician. He sold the
concept in 1965, and needed a rock band that could actually perform to make the show work. However,
after it was deemed for legal reasons that they couldn't use the very real
band The Lovin' Spoonful, he decided he'd just have to make up his own band.
Rafelson placed an advertisement looking for musicians in some trade magazines.
About 437 people responded to the ad,
including future legends Stephen Stills and Paul Williams, who both didn't get the gig.
The only future Monkee who showed up for that initial audition was Micheal Nesmith.
The four men who were eventually cast — Micky Dolenz, Peter Tork, Davy Jones,
and Nesmith — were relatively unknown, but they were all professionals. Nesmith and Tork were both
accomplished musicians and performers — in fact, Stills recommended his friend Tork to Rafelson.
Dolenz was a former child star, who had headlined his own series called "Circus
Boy." And Jones had received a Tony nomination in 1963 for his performance in "Oliver!"
Although the four guys selected to be the Monkees all had performing and musical experience,
they'd never played together before forming the band for the show.
So Rafelson hired veteran music producer Don Kirshner to whip them into shape.
This included weeks of rehearsals, acting classes, and filming a pilot.
All that work paid off, and quickly. The first ad seeking musicians for the show appeared on
September 8, 1965. Taping for the show began on May 31, 1966, and the Monkees' debut single "Last
Train to Clarkesville" was released on August 16, 1966, less than a year after the endeavor began.
The show premiered on September 12, 1966, and the band's debut album,
"The Monkees," dropped on October 10. Both the single and the album hit Number 1 on October 29,
with the album actually knocking "Revolver" by the Beatles out of the top spot. And it
stayed there until it was dethroned by the Monkees' second album, "More of the Monkees,"
which included the band's all-time classic "I'm a Believer," written by Neil Diamond.
Though Rafelson had been floating the idea of a TV show about musicians since at least 1963, no one
was interested until Beatlemania and the success of the Fab Four's movie "A Hard Day's Night."
So it's not too surprising that the personas of the Monkees were explicitly based on the Beatles.
In the Beatles, of course, Paul McCartney was known as the cute one, John Lennon was the
smart one, George Harrison was the quiet one, and Ringo was the clown. According to Closer Weekly,
the four guys cast in "The Monkees" were explicitly given similar roles to play:
Davy Jones was the cute one, Micky Dolenz was the funny one,
Mike Nesmith was the smart one, and Peter Tork got the thankless role of the clown.
The way the Monkees were linked so explicitly to the Beatles earned
them one of their earliest and most dismissive nicknames: the Prefab Four.
Considering how incredibly successful "The Monkees" ultimately was,
it's easily forgotten that the first version of the show's pilot was a disaster.
In his autobiography, "I'm a Believer: My Life of Monkees, Music, and Madness,"
drummer Micky Dolenz says that all the TV networks turned down the pilot.
That could have been the end of the story, but Rafelson insisted on re-editing the pilot to try
to save the day. Changes included cutting out the character of the band's manager,
removing some title cards, and introducing raw footage from the cast's screen tests.
The end result — which actually aired as episode 10 of the first season — is pretty
ragged. The story makes little sense in its re-edited version, and many of the
jokes were butchered, leaving behind punch lines without any sort of setup or context.
The changes clicked with audiences, however. It was a hit with test groups,
and NBC put in a series order for the fall of 1966.
It's easy to dismiss "The Monkees" as a silly 1960s show exploiting the popularity
of the Beatles, but in fact it was truly a groundbreaking show in an artistic sense. It
purposefully introduced avant-garde concepts like improvisation, jump cuts, and meta-referential
humor that broke the fourth wall, and explicitly noted that it was a fictional TV show.
It's hard for modern audiences to understand how ground-breaking "The Monkees" was,
but considering that the top-rated sitcom on TV in 1966 was "folksy" sitcom "The Andy Griffith
Show" gives you some idea of how different "The Monkees" really was. The AV Club reports that
the show was one of the first to use postmodern techniques, like Micky Dolenz walking off to talk
to the writers directly, or Davy Jones stopping in the middle of a scene to ask for a second take.
In "Why the Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture," author Roseanne Welch
notes that "The Monkees" used a metatextual approach to challenge other limitations. In
one episode, Peter Tork makes a deal with the Devil, and the band discusses going to hell. But
each time they say "hell," it's bleeped out due to television censorship, leading to Micky saying
"You know what's even more scary?" "What?" "You can't say 'hell' on television."
The Monkees didn't invent the music video — there are plenty of examples of musical
short films going back decades. And the TV show didn't even pioneer the fast editing
and energy that we associate with modern music videos — the Beatles
kind of did that with "A Hard Days Night." But the musical segments on "The Monkees"
differed from more traditional TV shows in that they were often presented as separate
from the narrative — essentially as music videos dropped in the middle of the story.
These energetic scenes were called "romps," and they were a big part of the show's popularity,
as they were different from anything else on television. And they ended up
having a huge impact on pop culture thanks in part to Mike Nesmith.
Following the end of the series, Nesmith — who was independently wealthy thanks to an
inheritance — continued to develop the music video form as part of his
solo career. He eventually developed the music video TV series "PopClips,"
which was bought by Warner Bros. in 1981 and expanded into a whole new network called MTV.
When "The Monkees" debuted in 1966 there was something extremely unusual about the show that
today's audiences might not notice: There was no "adult" character to offer the band
moral guidance and advice. As guitarist Peter Tork told the Concord Monitor,
this was really unheard of — every comedy before had an adult mentor figure,
but "The Monkees" presented a group of young people figuring stuff out all on their own.
As the generation gap widened in the 1960s, this was a pretty notable artistic decision.
Of course, the original pilot for the show did have a senior adult figure to offer guidance
to the band — their manager. But after the pilot was recut by producer Bob Rafelson,
the manager appeared only briefly, and was never mentioned again.
"The Monkees" is a comedy with distinct slapstick roots, so it makes sense that
there are connections to the Three Stooges. The interactions between the band members
often echoes the way Larry, Moe, and Curly would rapid fire jokes and perform physical comedy.
And that's intentional. According to Dolenz, the producers made the cast watch films by the
Three Stooges in order to learn those skills, and author Jonathan Etter notes that director
Irving Lippman, who directed 56 of the 58 episodes of "The Monkees,"
had directed several Three Stooges films before working on the show.
And according to Woman's World, the show even repurposed a lot of
the sets and props that the Three Stooges had used in their films,
including a pair of pajamas worn by both Curly Howard and Peter Tork.
"The Monkees" would have been a different show if the Three Stooges hadn't existed.
As author Jake Austen notes in "TV-a-Go-Go: Rock on TV from American Bandstand to American Idol,"
"The Monkees" was a scripted show, but the scripts were very loose. Television Academy
reports that the "romps" in each episode and a lot of the dialogue were improvised by the cast.
That improv spirit gave the show its zany energy and contributed to its rule-breaking success.
But it had a downside: the lack of a strict script meant timing out the episodes was impossible,
and as a result many of the episodes came in short. Due to the meta nature of much of
the show's humor, being "a minute short as usual" became a recurring joke on the show.
"you guys know of course that we've only got one minute to say everything that's on your mind.
Collectively if you've something to say that's really important…"
According to author Rosanne Welch, the producers solved this problem by adding
interviews with the cast and crew to the end of short episodes. This may have started
as an easy way to extend an episode, but it quickly became a popular aspect of the show,
and is another example of "The Monkees" breaking new ground by further dissolving the line between
actor and character — something that other shows and movies soon emulated.
"Now, it's clear that every time that
the hippies come up with something really vital, and intelligent, and interesting,
the establishment will take it over and put down the people who originated it."
Even those who have fond memories of "The Monkees" sometimes fall into the
trap of thinking of it as a slight comedy that rode the coattails of Beatlemania.
But even back in the '60s, some people recognized that "The Monkees" was a really great show.
In fact, the show actually won two Emmy Awards during its run,
picking up one for outstanding comedy series and a second for outstanding directorial achievement
in comedy, for the work of director James Frawley on the episode "Royal Flush" in 1967.
In "Total Control: The Michael Nesmith Story,"
author Randi L. Massingill reports that "The Monkees" taking two Emmy's was a bit of a shock:
"The Dick Van Dyke Show" had just ended after dominating the award for years,
and everyone expected an established show with better ratings to win.
The Monkees were hugely successful and popular during the first season of their show, but much
of the viewing public assumed, incorrectly, that they wrote and performed their own music.
In fact, a killer group of songwriters wrote most of the material on the Monkees' first two albums,
including Carole King, Neil Sedaka, and Harry Nilsson, and some of the best session musicians
in the world recorded the music for their albums — including the legendary Wrecking Crew.
The Hollywood Reporter explains that when the band's lack of involvement in their
early songs became widely known, there was a backlash. What the public may not have known,
though, is that the members of the band actually wanted to make the music
themselves. And as the series became more popular, they did exactly that,
taking on more and more playing and songwriting duties, and touring live extensively.
Despite the show's popularity, and despite the band's increasing musical skills,
a third season of "The Monkees" never happened. According to Woman's World,
the band didn't like the creative direction of the series, and instead
wanted to switch to a variety-show format for the third season. But NBC wasn't on board,
so when the band refused to do a third season as a sitcom, the series was over.
Still, for a show that lasted just two seasons in the late 1960s, "The Monkees"
remains pretty prominent in pop culture. The reason for that is simple: syndication and MTV.
"The Monkees" went into syndication on CBS in 1969, where it ran on Saturday mornings.
An entire new generation of kids was exposed to its charms as they ate their cereal. And when the
show went into general syndication in 1975, that audience expanded to include the entire country.
Then, in 1986, MTV began airing old episodes of "The Monkees" and something unexpected happened:
the reruns were among MTV's highest-rated programs.
This sparked a second wave of "Monkeemania." Four of the band's old albums reentered the charts,
the band reunited for a successful tour, and they even eventually began recording new music.
Sadly, The Monkees lost singer Davy Jones in 2012,
when he passed away at the age of 66. Seven years later, in 2019,
Peter Tork also passed away at the age of 77. But despite these losses, The Monkees will always live
on in the hearts of their fans thanks to their great music, and their groundbreaking TV show.
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