The Jimmy Stewart Show: The Complete Series

By the early 1970s, Jimmy Stewart, one of Hollywood's most beloved actors, hadn't exactly retired from the big screen - he would keep making intermittent movie appearances up through 1991's An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, six years before his death - but he had become a much less frequent film presence than he was in the 1950s and '60s. For a time, he made a bid for small screen stardom with this eponymously-titled one-season sitcom on NBC. Stewart played James K. Howard, a professor at Josiah Kessel College (an institution founded by his grandfather) in apocryphal Easy Valley, California. When the program began, Professor Howard's 29-year-old son, Peter (Jonathan Daly) moved back in with his dad, his own house having burned to the ground in a fire. Accompanying him were his family - wife Wendy (Ellen Geer) and eight-year-old son Jake (Kirby Furlong), who was ironically the same age as James and his wife Martha's (Julie Adams) other son, Teddy (Dennis Larson). Episodes revolved around the complications wrought by having three generations of Howard men (and six individuals) under the same roof. John McGiver co-starred as Professor Howard's good friend, Dr. Luther Quince, another professor at Josiah Kessel.