The Donna Reed Show: SEASON 4 (1 Viewer)

[Greg2356]

I have no idea when 'Season 5' will be released from MPI. We are all kinda burnt out with trying to will the release of Season 4!! I did enjoy 'Season 4' very much though. The episodes were quite different in style compared to the previous Season's 1,2, and 3, so for me they were so much fun to watch! Whatever experiment they were trying to do when the producers of "The Donna Reed Show" were in the process of making these 'Season 4' episodes, I agree with... When 'Season 5' episodes are released, they will be more in the style of the episodes that were produced for season's 1, 2, and 3. I say this, because I have seen the 'Season 5' episodes of this series on "Nick at Nite" when they were shown unedited during the first two years that they had aired on the "Nick at Nite" Network. These "Season 5" episodes were done extremely well!!! It's an A+ Season. Don't get me wrong, I thought 'Season 4' was a very excellent season as well, with some quite interesting and entertaining episodes!
Mary Owen has no idea when 'Season 5' will be released and she hasn't heard anything conclusive from MPI regarding it's release date. Mary was so very consumed with getting 'Season 4' released, that I think she has just left 'Season 5' in the total hands of MPI. If I do hear anything about Season Five's release date, I will write about it here on this forum.

 

[Bob_S.]

Thanks Greg. I guess sales from Season 4 will dictate whether we see season 5 or not. I was under the assumption (falsely it looks like) that it was a definite go for the rest of the seasons that Mary owned. Here's hoping for the best!

 

[Greg2356]

Yes Bob- Season 5 is a definite go! Sorry If I gave you the impression that it wasn't. MPI just isn't telling anyone including Mary Owen when we might expect the next release date to be on this product... This way, they don't have to answer to anybody because otherwise, it is just too much pressure for everybody concerned!! I just hope all of us will not have to wait until the Holiday Season for the release of Season 5, but who knows???

 

[Neil Brock]

Well, for season 8 we at least have our uncut tape masters from Nick. I guess we'll be out of luck with seasons 6 & 7 ever showing up. No Dave Kelsey episodes!

 

[Greg2356]

I regret the fact, that you are most likely correct. I would just love to get seasons 6 and 7 with Bob Crane because these were the two seasons I remember the most, which I had viewed with my family in first run episodes when growing up. Bob Crane was so good in his role as Dr. Dave Kelsey. I only wish he could have stayed on the show for one more season. I am always thinking, well at least I'll have 6 seasons of the show counting the unedited episodes from season 8 that I had recorded from Nick at Nite. It will be a huge surprise though if we could ever get seasons 6 and 7 released on DVD in regards to "The Donna Reed Show."

 

[Greg2356]

[ATTACHMENT=354]Season Four of The Donna Reed Show.jpg (55k. jpg file)[/ATTACHMENT]
I've posted this in case some of you may have missed it.- TV on DVD: “The Donna Reed Show: Season Four – The Lost Episodes”
By: Tony Sclafani on December 20, 2011.
All good sitcom episodes have happy endings. So it stands to reason that the uncertainty over whether there would ever be a DVD release of the seldom-seen fourth season of The Donna Reed Show resolved itself like an episode of the show – cheerfully. The Donna Reed Show: Season Four – The Lost Episodes will be released through MPI Home Video Dec. 20, after having been originally slated for a Mother’s Day release earlier in the year.
One reason for the release is the enthusiasm of the show’s fans, which include two generations of viewers: those who followed it during its initial airing (1958-66) and those who discovered it in its decade-long run on Nick at Nite (1985-94). Both generations lobbied for the release of the fourth season, voicing their complaints on message boards and launching a campaign called “Bring The Donna Reed Show Season Four to DVD” on Facebook (the page is now deleted, but a related YouTube video survives).
Had this been an episode of the show, Reed’s fictional daughter, Mary Stone, would have probably played into the plot. But in this real life drama, it was Reed’s actual daughter, Mary Owen, who saved the day by making it her priority to make sure the fourth season of the show got released.
“It’s been a huge learning curve for me,” Owen says by phone from her home in New York. “But I feel it’s really important — I consider the show part of our American heritage and think it’s really important to keep the DVD releases going.”
To understand why the fourth season’s DVD release was delayed for over a year, some back story is in order.
First, it’s been up to Owen and her siblings to see that the show made it to DVD, since the rights to the show (or at least the first five seasons) are owned by them personally, not a media conglomerate. Owen’s mother and father (Tony Owen), who co-produced the show, had entered into a distribution agreement with the show’s production company, Screen Gems, way back in the 1960s. Since this was before DVDs or even VCR tapes were invented, there was no thought that there would be much of a market for the show in the distant future, so Screen Gems gave the show’s rights back to the family starting in 2003.
“When my parents died, we found out the show’s rights reverted back to us (children),” Owen explains. “I’m sure in their minds not only had they moved on, but probably never thought The Donna Reed Show would ever see the light of day again.”
For the first three seasons, Owen chose Allied Arts Alliance America (which became Virgil Films Entertainment) to put out the DVDs. “We signed up with them and we were really excited and the president is a huge fan of my mother’s career,” she says.
But she found she needed to change companies when producing the fourth season on DVD posed a challenge. Since the season had never been syndicated as part of the Nick at Night package, the episodes were disorganized and sometimes had to be pieced back together. Of course, it was the very fact that this season hadn’t been broadcast since the early 1970s that had fans of the show wanting to see it.
Why did Nick at Nite decide never to broadcast the fourth season (as well as the sixth and seventh)?
“I think because the show had a total of 275 episodes, they just didn’t want that much volume,” Owen says. “So somebody just made a decision to snip here and there and chose to broadcast mostly seasons 1, 2, 3, 5 and 8.”
After the release of the shows’ third season on DVD in 2009, “the market started tumbling down and putting out the fourth season was going to prove to be expensive because of the lack of syndication,” Owen says. So she chose to go with MPI Home Video which, she says, “has more experience with classic television.
“Season Four was never transferred to tape, so the digitizing is all from the original 35 millimeter stock,” Owen explains. “And there were a lot of missing end credits because of the way the original show ran. Originally it had a lot of sponsors and there were product placements in the end credits as well as in the intros. So it’s been a matter of finding the pieces and putting them all back together.”
Matching the various end credits to the right episodes became, she says, “kind of like a Sherlock Holmes investigation but luckily everything was found. MPI was incredible at finding everything. We’re so lucky — a lot of older shows weren’t that well cared for and a lot of stuff is missing.”
According to Owen, a DVD set for the show’s fifth season is already being planned and should be much easier to assemble since most of those episodes were syndicated. Sony holds the rights to the final three seasons of the show and Owen isn’t certain about whether those will come out on DVD.
But the fourth season DVD set, which contains 39 episodes spread over five discs, should be enough to keep fans occupied for a while. The episode that is likely to receive the most attention is Donna’s Prima Donna, which has Mary Stone forsaking college to start a singing career and debuting the song “Johnny Angel” on national television. The song, as released on the Colpix Records label, became a number one hit for Shelley Fabares, who starred as Mary.
The season four DVD package, Owen says, is also the first to feature bonus material, which will come in the form of interviews with both Fabares and Stu Phillips, the latter of whom founded the Colpix label, produced “Johnny Angel,” and then went on to work on another show that heavily featured pop music, “The Monkees.”
The season also featured a plethora of guest stars, including James Darren (another Colpix artist), Cloris Leachman, John Astin, Swoozie Kurtz and baseball great Don Drysdale.
To celebrate the launch of the new DVD set, MPI organized a reunion and tribute program featuring some of the show’s surviving actors (Reed passed away in 1986). The event was held Dec. 6 in Los Angeles’ Paley Center and was attended by Fabares, co-star Paul Petersen, Darren and Phillips.
Watching the “lost” episodes again on DVD left a big impression on Owen. “There are some poignant and subtly dramatic moments that are impressive and just make me think that it’s time again for ‘The Donna Reed Show,’” she says. “There are so many gentle lessons and great images about the American family, which I feel is not currently in the best condition.”
The Donna Reed Show’s depiction of the American family is what it’s best remembered for, and likely the reason viewers from two separate generations made it a hit. When the show started, it centered around the adventures of the four-member Stone family, which included Donna (played by Reed), her physician husband Alex (Carl Betz), their teenage daughter Mary and their precocious pre-adolescent son Jeff (Paul Petersen).
As the show progressed, that formula would be altered, with Paul Petersen’s younger sister Patty becoming a cast member when Fabares left the show. But it was the family-centric thrust of the show that attracted its initial flurry of viewers, who probably saw it was a reflection of their own lives when it originally aired.
Scroll ahead twenty years to the Generation Xers who rediscovered it in reruns, and you’d probably find they saw the show as an expression of what they would have liked their family lives to be like: harmonious, with an intact family unit and parents that actually cared and gave good advice to the kids.
The show’s purported “wholesomeness” drew its share of criticism over the years, as Donna Reed came to symbolize the stereotypical 1950s suburban housewife, with all the cultural baggage that comes with that image. Although there’s some truth to that, the show was never that simplistic. The dynamic between the characters was more believable than that of most other shows of its era, and it sometimes dealt with real life issues, albeit gently. Once in a while the show even tackled risky subjects like drug abuse, which was the central theme of the eighth season episode The Big League Shock.
The show was actually proto-feminist in some respects. Not only did it bear the name of its star, it was partly developed by Reed and invariably showed Reed’s character as being the backbone of the family – solving the problems, keeping things running. And while the show’s initial opening segment did picture Reed’s character as the standard “happy housewife” seeing her family off as they go out the door in the morning, later seasons showed her leaving for work as well.
That sounds like subversion of the norm of the 1950s and 1960s rather than the norm itself. All of which may have endeared it to its second generation audience, which was able to see the show as nostalgic, but not embarrassingly so.
“It’s been frustrating for me, especially when I was in college because the ’70s wave of feminism considered what she represented in the show to be pretty bad,” Owen says. “I felt like they were missing the fact that she was way ahead of her time. They had it completely wrong.
“My mother grew up on a farm,” she continues, “and in those days the work was equally divided between men and women. I don’t think my mother was consciously a feminist, but I think she naturally felt having worked early in her life and been part of the MGM film system that women were just as capable as men.”
By the time the show started, Reed was also a veteran film actress who had won a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her role in “From Here to Eternity.” She and producer/husband Tony Owen had heavy input into the creative process of the show throughout the show’s run.
“Her creative input can be seen by the way the show was run,” Owen says. “Ida Lupino directed a couple of episodes and Barbara Avedon cut her teeth there, writing and directing episodes, and she went on to create (the 1980s female detective show) ‘Cagney & Lacey.’”
Some of the above issues might be familiar to viewers of more modern television, since they were raised in an early “Gilmore Girls” episode, That Damn Donna Reed. In fact, the small town world of Hilldale depicted on “The Donna Reed Show” isn’t so far removed from the town of Stars Hollow where “Gilmore Girls” took place – only there’s less irony and fewer references to pop culture.
“I think Donna Stone was a very modern character,” Owen says. “Within each episode she kind of went outside the boundaries of being a 1950s stay at home mom. And by the end of each episode she kind of comes back to that role. But I think she’s got a very modern quality, which is why it was so popular on Nick at Nite.”

 

[BobO'Link]

Great article, Mark!
And of course the question: Do you have any information about Season 5? The article mentions it will be an "easier" release but it's been so quiet since S4 was released.

 

[Ron Lee Green]

I recently got this, and I am enjoying watching these episodes.
I have a question: Did the show have a teaser before the opening credits?
I noticed most Screen Gems shows like Bewitched and Hazel began with 1-2 minute teaser and then went to the opening credits.
It seems most episodes on the Donna Reed DVD begin with the opening titles, and the teaser is after.

 

[Greg2356]

Ron, I can assure you that "The Donna Reed Show" during it's entire eight year run never had a teaser before it's opening credits. Great question though!!

 

[Gary OS]

Thanks for keeping this thread updated, Mark. I hope we can see the next Season (Five) by the midway point of next year. I know it's likely to the last one released as well, unless Sony does something very unexpected. While the completionist in me would absolutely love to see all 8 seasons out on dvd, I'll be very happy if we can at least get the primary Shelley years completed (which S5 would, of course, do).


Gary "great b/w show that I hope we see more of" O.

 

[Greg2356]

@ Bob and Gary: I am hoping that The Donna Reed Show's 'Fifth Season' will at least hopefully be completed by the holiday season as it was last year, but there is no telling since MPI is quite good at keeping their lips sealed up very tightly!!! I don't want to bother Mary Owen by asking her periodically when this Season 5 will finally be released, because I know how much she hated the fact of how long it took Season 4 to be released of her Mom's Television Show. I know she would just love to give us all some excellent news about Season 5 which she absolutely will do if MPI gives her any conclusive information of when the release of Season 5 might be... I think MPI felt very pressured to release Season 4 as quickly as it could possibly be able to do so... I doubt MPI will let anybody pressure them this time around! I am tempted to email Mary and ask her about Season 5, but I don't want her to feel bad if she isn't able to give me some great news on the subject!! I know all the emotional pain and agony she went through during the process of Season Four's release and so I just don't want to put any unnecessary pressure on her is all! She will be giving us another update soon I am sure on the "We Love The Donna Reed Show" page.
As far as Season's 6, 7, and 8 are concerned, I would just love to have these episodes released, but as you say Gary who knows what Sony will do and if they might end up doing something very unexpected!! Mary Owen has said in the past that she thinks Sony is just too big to care, but Mary also said, that she hopes she is wrong about this!

 

[skees53]

Me TV is scheduled to air Donna Reed weekdays at 7:30 AM beginning in September, any idea which episodes these will be? It sounds like the sixth and seventh season won't be among those based upon that article.

 

[Ron Lee Green]

WOW! I didn't see that coming--especially from Me-TV.
I think Antenna TV was going to air it once --which made sense because they seem to have all the old Screen Gems/Sony shows.
I will definitely record seasons 5-8 if they show it, since I already have seasons 1-4.

 

[Greg2356]

When Antenna TV had planned to air "The Donna Reed Show" they had said it was from the episodes that Sony Pictures owned, which would be seasons 6, 7, and 8. I was really looking forward to recording these episodes because they may never get a DVD release! I sent Antenna TV an email asking them what seasons they had planned to air and they sent me an email back saying that they might not be able to air "The Donna Reed Show" because they were having trouble with the distributors. And of course, this series never did air on Antenna TV! What a big disappointment!!!! I don't know what seasons Me-TV is planning to air, but I am very excited about it none the less! We are trying to contact Mary Owen to see if Me-TV has contacted her about the episodes that she and her family members own the rights to, which are seasons 1 through 5, this way we can get some idea regarding the seasons of "The Donna Reed Show" ME-TV might be planning to air.

 

[Neil Brock]

Since seasons six and seven have not been syndicated since the 70s, it's doubtful that tape copies exist. Whether or not Sony would go to the expense of creating tape transfers, I would doubt since they wouldn't do it for Farmers Daughter when Antenna wanted to buy it.

 

[Greg2356]

I just checked out Me-TV's New Fall Schedule and it looks like they are going to start "The Donna Reed Show" from Season 1. The publicity picture they showed of Donna Reed was definitely from season 1. And they also had shown a very short video clip for a few seconds from "The Donna Reed Show" Season 1 opening credits. So this is what I had wanted to know and I think that I have received my answer.

 

[Ron Lee Green]

I just checked the schedule, too. They are indeed going to start with episode 1 on Sept. 3--just 3 weeks away!
http://metvnetwork.com/schedule.php?date=09/03/2012

7:30 am The Donna Reed Show: Weekend Trip

"Donna and alex experience difficulties getting away with the kids for the weekend."

 

[skees53]

When Antenna TV had planned to air "The Donna Reed Show" they had said it was from the episodes that Sony Pictures owned, which would be seasons 6, 7, and 8. I was really looking forward to recording these episodes because they may never get a DVD release! I sent Antenna TV an email asking them what seasons they had planned to air and they sent me an email back saying that they might not be able to air "The Donna Reed Show" because they were having trouble with the distributors. And of course, this series never did air on Antenna TV! What a big disappointment!!!! I don't know what seasons Me-TV is planning to air, but I am very excited about it none the less! We are trying to contact Mary Owen to see if Me-TV has contacted her about the episodes that she and her family members own the rights to, which are seasons 1 through 5, this way we can get some idea regarding the seasons of "The Donna Reed Show" ME-TV might be planning to air.

Yeah, that was exactly what I heard from Antenna TV... they really did want the show, but couldn't get it under the "right terms" or whatever, which to me sounds like they were going after the ones Sony owned (seasons 6-8) and would only be able to AIR the ones in that subset that Sony has syndicated (i.e. only season 8). I can't say I blame them for it. It really wouldn't be worth it for anybody to acquire a series that lasted eight seasons and only be able to air one season.
Honestly, I'm a little disappointed with the timeslot Me TV is giving it... 7:30 AM means I won't get to see it, because my local station (a CBS affiliate) airs a "bonus two hours" of news from 7-9 AM every weekday! Of course, if it is just the ones we've already seen on DVD, it won't be a total tragedy for me. I've got all four of the DVD season sets that are out there so far, I'll only be missing out on season 5 (until that is released, that is).

 

[Greg2356]

Yes: Mary Owen, her siblings, and one other third party has given ME-TV the rights to air episodes from "The Donna Reed Show." They have everything available to them to air that has currently been released on DVD. This means of course that ME-TV doesn't currently have the rights yet to air the Fifth Season. And Seasons 6 through 8 are not included in this deal with ME-TV.

 

[AlanP]

FYI gang Make Room For Daddy is also coming to Metv on 9/3 very excited two of my faces are returning!!!