Family Affair on WB

TVGuide.com: So, you blew off the hot-shot TV Guide reporter....
Caitlin Wachs: Oh, no! [Laughs] Maybe I'll win you back.

Question: When I was a kid in the late '60s/early '70s, there was a Christmas movie I saw more than once on TV. It was about a little shepherd boy who chases a bird off a cliff and died. He goes to heaven, where the angels are preparing for Jesus' birthday, but he just wants to go home. Finally he's allowed to go home, and he comes back with the little box he keeps his treasures in and realizes that giving it to the baby Jesus would be a true gift from the heart. Do you know the title? Now that I think about it, I'm not even sure whether it was a movie or a television Christmas special.

Answer: You're remembering a Hallmark Hall of Fame TV-movie called The Littlest Angel (1969), starring Johnny Whitaker of the series Family Affair (1966-1971) as the child angel. Many people have strong and vivid memories of the impression this movi read more

Question: What was the last show Brian Keith did? The one with the car, I mean. Thank you.

Answer: Well, that's really two answers, Mary Pat. The late Keith's last show wasn't ABC's Hardcastle & McCormick, which ran from September 1983 to July 1986. That would be NBC's sitcom Walter and Emily, which was on the schedule for a year beginning in November 1991, and even that was preceded by CBS' 1989 comedy Heartland and ABC's Pursuit of Happiness.

Hardcastle was a hit for ABC for a short while, and it's funny that you remember it as "the one with the car." I'm sure Keith, who played crusty retired judge Milton Hardcastle, and costar Daniel Hugh-Kelly, who played sidekick and crack driver "Skid" McCormick, would have much preferred their show to be remembered as a buddy comedy. In fact, in a 1984 TV Guide interview, the equ read more

Question: Who played Buffy on Family Affair?

Answer: Anissa Jones played Buffy alongside Johnnie Whitaker (Sigmund and the Sea Monsters) on the series, which ran on CBS for five years beginning in September 1966. The show focused on swinging bachelor Bill Davis (Hardcastle & McCormick's Brian Keith) and his valet, Mr. French (Sebastian Cabot), two men whose lives took a change for the domestic when Buffy, her twin brother, Jody (Whitaker), and their older sister, Cissy (Kathy Garver), the children of Bill's late brother, moved in. But the main draw for the audience tuning in was the cute little twins — and the adults in the cast were well aware of it.

"Now those kids, bless 'em, they don't use any tricks," Sabby Cabot told TV Guide in 1967. "But t read more