Bill Daily - Television Roles

Television Roles

Television executives liked Daily's clean-cut looks and superb comic timing (due to his brief role as Steve Allen's announcer/sidekick on his daily syndicated talk show in 1964), so by the mid-1960s he earned guest spots on sitcoms like My Mother the Car, The Farmer's Daughter, and Bewitched. Veteran sitcom writer Sidney Sheldon noticed Daily in one of his myriad small roles, and decided that he would be perfect for a character in his new sitcom, I Dream of Jeannie.

The part on Jeannie was that of a United States Army test pilot and NASA astronaut named Roger Healey, who would be sidekick and best friend to Larry Hagman's main character, Tony Nelson. It was a dream part for Daily, who made playing Healey look effortless; it was said that Daily never won any awards for his portrayals because he made it look too easy—people thought he was simply playing himself. While Daily enjoyed his work on Jeannie, Hagman decidedly did not. Daily was witness to multiple Hagman tantrums on the set, but he and Barbara Eden stood behind Hagman, citing a substance problem and the progressively poorer scripts on Jeannie as the roots of Hagman's fits.

In 1972, two years after Jeannie was canceled, Daily was back at work and back in an aviator's uniform, in what is perhaps his signature role: Howard Borden in The Bob Newhart Show. Borden, a commercial-airline navigator who later became a co-pilot, lived across the hall from Bob Newhart's Bob Hartley character, would frequently pop into the Hartley's apartment to borrow things, mooch a meal, or have the Hartleys take care of his son when he had custody of him. After six years of success, The Bob Newhart Show ended its run.

Daily would also occasionally serve as a panelist on the 1970s CBS game show The Match Game, more often than not giving bizarre answers that seldom matched those of the contestants. After Richard Dawson's departure, Daily was a semi-regular in the lower-tier middle seat for the last three-plus years of the show's CBS and syndicated run.

For the two years that followed The Bob Newhart Show, Daily returned to stand-up, but in 1980, after years of making a living as a second banana, Daily was offered his own show. Called Small & Frye, the show featured Daily as a neurotic doctor; it lasted only three months before being canceled. In 1988, Daily tried his hand again at starring roles, this time as another doctor on the sitcom Starting From Scratch. It fared only mildly better than Frye, and was canceled after one season. Daily's most notable post-Newhart role was another supporting one, that of Larry the Psychiatrist on the cult favorite ALF (1986).

During the 1980s-1990s, Daily reprised his I Dream of Jeannie role of Roger Healey in two made-for-TV reunion movies: I Dream of Jeannie: 15 Years Later (1985) and I Still Dream of Jeannie (1991). Also in 1991, he reprised the role of Howard Borden in "The Bob Newhart Show: 19th Anniversary", which aired in February of that year. In 1997 he was a guest star on Caroline in the City.