My title is the last words spoken in the series, by Fred MacMurray to the last of his three sons (there were four actually). Twelve years on, what had started as a whimsical comic vehicle for Fred MacMurray crashed on a serious note. Son Ernie is tasked by a friend of Steve's to narc out their sullen teenager. Surely a Douglass lad, so straight an arrow, can reform any deviant. And of course he does, with the show's trademark 'Sure Dad!' effortlessness. And that's why we won the war on pot. Everyone expected the M3S dream to go on for another season and were caught unprepared when it didn't. But 1972 was a world of different from 1960, and all the stars of the 1940s were shown the TV door around the same time. There was no room for maudlin sentiment on television anymore. They had to make room for the Brady Bunch.
Review of Whatever Happened to Ernie?
