On the occasion of its third season on NBC, the full-color Western Bonanza was moved from its old Saturday night slot to a more advantageous Sunday evening berth, thereby inheriting a scheduling gap left vacant by the departure of singing star Dinah Shore. Bonanza also inherited Shore's longtime sponsor, Chevrolet -- and thus it was that virtually every season three episode opened with the famous Chevy logo, forged into a branding iron, literally "burning" the Cartwright clan -- Ben (Lorne Greene), Adam (Pernell Roberts), Hoss (Dan Blocker), and Little Joe (Michael Landon) onto the screen. The season's opening episode, "The Smiler," was directed by Western veteran Thomas Carr (who also helmed a number of Superman episodes), and features Catherine McLeod, an actress best remembered for her anguished exclamation, "Mother, please! I'd rather do it myself!" in all those Anacin commercials of the early '60s. In another guest appearance of note, singer Vaughn Monroe does a rare acting turn in the episode "The Wooing of Abigail Jones." And in keeping with the Cartwrights' frequent encounters with real-life historical characters, "Look to the Stars" dramatizes an early event in the life of Nobel Prize-winning Albert Abraham Michelson (here depicted as a young boy, played by Douglas Lambert). Arguably the most memorable of the season's offerings is "Inger, My Love," a flashback episode in which Inga Swenson appears as Ben Cartwright's second wife Inger, the mother of Ben's middle son Hoss. The switch to Sunday nights was the best thing ever to happen to Bonanza. The series closed out its third season as the second highest-rated program in America, one notch below another long-running Western, Wagon Train.
by Hal Erickson
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