my favorite house guest

Before Bill Bixby was Eddie's father or The Hulk, he had a favorite Martian. Ray Walston played the stranded anthropologist alien. MY FAVORITE MARTIAN (63-66) was one of my favorite sitcoms as a kid. Bill Bixby played Tim O'Hara, a mild mannered newspaper reporter who takes the illegal alien into his home. In order to conceal the Martian's identity - Exigius 12 1/2 takes on the identity of Uncle Martin. Tim keeps Uncle Martin's wreaked spacecraft in his garage. Like GILLIGAN'S ISLAND (the more renown work of Sherwood Schwartz) the Martian never could seem to launch his ship either.

You can put this show in the I DREAM OF JEANNIE and BEWITCHED, MR. ED and MY MOTHER THE CAR category. The sixties were chock full of shows of people that had to hide identities of unusual house guests.

This YouTube video is part 1 of 5 of the original pilot. It's a very breezy little situation comedy. Smothers Brothers had a short lived sitcom that had almost the same story line. Instead of an Martian in the apartment - Tommy Smother's was an angel.