The G. Stands for Walter

The man who created one of TV's most indelible characters has died. I'm speaking, of course, of Bob Denver, but not, of course, of Gilligan. Before Sherwood Schwartz's (no relation) weekly morality play (each of the castaways represented a different Deadly Sin, don'tcha know), Bob played the great beatnik role model Maynard G. Krebs on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, perhaps the greatest "lost" sitcom of all time. I caught this show during its brief run on Nick at Nite in the early '90's, but during its original run (1959-63) it must have been an oddity; a hip, subversive look at high school and romance (the MacGuffin, essentially was Dobie's endless scheming to either get laid or rich or both), it regularly broke the fourth wall as Dobie addressed his anxieties and frustrations to the audience. Denver inhabited Maynard with a gangly, lazy wisdom; he name-dropped hepcats like Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonius Monk, caught "The Monster that Devoured Cleveland" at the Bijou just about every week, and howled with shock and horror whenever the word "work" was mentioned. (Why isn't the full run of this show collected on DVD?) Of course, after Gilligan, hardly anyone remembers Dobie and Maynard. What a shame.



Goodbye, Bob. Goodbye, Maynard.