Shark Bytes

I have purchased the 18 disc set and I also taped it when it was on Comedy Central 15-16 years ago. PLEASE PUT THE COMPLETE SERIES OF SGT. BILKO ON DVD. This show is an excellent compliment to F-Troop, Hogan's Heroes, McHale's Navy and MASH.

Never Jumped. The Bilko Goes to College episode is perhaps the single funniest sit-com episode ever (especially if you are a sports fan)

The best ever! Don't forget when it aired in the '50's there were only two or three t.v. stations in most areas of the country and most homes didn't even have t.v. sets at that time. The show probably had their pick of the best writers and actors available and it showed. I think there are about 25 really super episodes and the rest are just great. Some of the later episodes were just o.k. as the writers came and went, and Doberman was featured a bit too often. (the young viewers loved him)

Never ever jumped, pure genius. If anyone wants to see how sitcoms should be made this is it. Forget friends, Will and Grace etc this is where it begins and ends.

I love the show, I really do wish someone on Cable would pick this up, I have bought the entire series on DVD off ebay, but sadly as they were taped off TV some episodes stop halfway through or there has been clumsy editing to remove the ads in which littel snippets of dialogue have also been cut.
Its a sheer joy to watch, I 1st caught it aired on bbc2 about 13 years ago when I was 16 and was totally hooked from that moment.
Everythign about it is perfect and I dont think we will see the likes of Phil and his great cast of actors in a show like this again.
Who would have the courage to write anything like this now without resorting to smut, filth and swearing to get laughs?, Nat Hiken and the cast proved it could be done without such cheap gimmicks.

The Phil Silvers Show has a fair claim to being the greatest sitcom of all time. It was certainly one of the funniest & deserves to be shown again on cable TV. Is it because it was shot in black & white that today it is ignored by the likes of UK Gold etc. It is occasionally shown on BBC2 but deserves a full rerun somewhere on British TV. UK Gold, for example, have shown in recent years repeats of Hancock, Steptoe & son, Blackadder & Fawlty towers, i.e.the cream of British comedy television. Currently in syndication on UK TV are repeats of Bewitched & I dream of genie, good solid US sitcoms, but not in the same league as The Phil Silvers Show. As has been written by many others on JTS, Phil Silvers was a comic genius. The running gag on many shows of him fawning to Colonel Hall & buttering up to his wife, used to crack me up every time. The scripting for the show was razor sharp, but it was Phil Silvers delivery that was so brilliant. All the characters in the show seemed to fit them perfectly, but Phil Silvers was the lynchpin which made it never less than funny & frequently utterly hilarious. It fully deserves to be shown again for a new generation to enjoy & see for themselves what a priceless gem of a comedy actor Phil Silvers was.

No shark zone with this show! Finally we're starting to see a released collection of this comic masterpiece. Nat Hiken even published the scripts in a paperback book - it's a real find when one shows up in a used bookstore. And as good as they are on paper, these shows come to life with the brilliant ensemble cast seamlessly joined with the amazing Silvers.

There were many great later shows. However the early shows were about the smartest soldier in the army who would pull a get rich scheme and lose the riches at the end for a greater good-- usually to help out a buddy. As the writers changed, most just showed the Sergeant to be a cheap hustler whose schemes would fail in the last three minutes. Grover and Ritzik became idiots, precursors of Jethro and Gilligan. They had to be written as idiots or the plots wouldn't work. Phil Silvers himself was brilliant through every episode. But the quality of the episodes dropped markedly after the first two seasons.

I don't think "The Phil Silvers Show" ever jumped the shark. There are so many of the later episodes that are just as funny as earlier ones. Bilko's Grand Hotel and Bilko's Vampire are two examples.

Never jumped. Consistently funny, and not always predictable. The bewildered Colonel Hall was always excellent (and I think I heard the actor was just as confused).

Phil Silvers showed that he can adapt from film & stage to television extremely well in this classic tv show.I believe it is faultless and the only defect it had was the film remake(ALWAYS the case when making a tv show a film,take Lost In Space as a prime example) but that was decades after anyway.Great characters and scripts,genuinely classic material.THIS SHOW HAS TO GO ON DVD SOON! IT SHOULD BE COMPLETE SEASONS AND NOT JUST "BEST OF`S" PLEASE!! Anyway,every person played their roles like they were born to play them.Characters such as Bilko,Barbella,Henshaw,Doberman,Col. Hall,Fleishman,Ritzick and Grover were unforgettable.A big thank-you to the cast and crew for such a memorable achievement in TV history!

This was a hilarious show! He always came up with some crazy scheme but never seemed to be able to actually get rich like he wanted to. I love how he would scheme and scheme and when he wasn't scheming, no one believed him! One of my faves was the episode where he had an empty store, but no one believed it was "just an empty store" and wanted to get inside, so he charged them admission. . . It was classically funny and definitely never jumped. Even the movie with Steve Martin was funny and had decent characterization.

What a hoot! The postings bring back fond memories of a more civilized era when we could laugh at the contrived machinations of one Ernest G. Bilko and his cohorts rather than have to put up with the sublime idiocy of people eating each other's vomit or hoping to be hired by a bewigged egomaniac. Bilko could never have jumped!

The best comedy show EVER!.It's 50 years old and still as fresh as when it was first made.The formula was the same every week but they resisted the temptation to let Bilko get rich.

The Phil Silvers Show (aka Sgt Bilko/You'll Never Get Rich) never even came close to jumping. I remember watching this during its prime time run when I was a kid. The whole family cracked up at the schemes of the shifty Ernie Bilko. Great cast too. One of the all-time classic sitcoms.