The Phil Silvers Show: Bilko the Art Lover

"Radar, you're not going to believe this!"

The Phil Silvers Show: Bilko the Art Lover
CBS
March 5, 1958
Sitcom
DVD
B-

The twenty-third episode of the third season tops the weirdness of a young Dick Van Dyke as a "hillbilly baseball whiz" with an impossibly young Alan Alda as a "rich boy" artist.  He's 22 playing 24 and the wardrobe, makeup, and hair on him make him look like he's wandered over from the 1930s, which I guess is appropriate about fifteen years before he'd be in the Korean War.  Unlike Van Dyke, he has a straight role (his first IMDB credit until '62) and plays it very earnestly, even when another artist offers to share a bathtub.  This is set  mostly in New York and has Bilko scheming unsuccessfully in the art world and successfully in the business world.  The most implausible of many implausible moments is Bilko turning down a chance to spend a week alone in a mansion with a willing French (or Swedish) maid.

This is one of the eleven episodes where Nelson Olmsted plays Captain Masters, MD, but the first one to pop up on this collection.  Larry Fletcher who plays Alda's nameless Father, would later be two other characters.