"I always felt that Ernie Bilko was equal parts Nat Hiken and Phil Silvers," Leonard Stern
The purpose of this website is to celebrate the series called The Phil Silvers Show. - to provide a definitive source of information about this television comedy classic.
The Phil Silvers Show - also titled 'You'll Never Get Rich' and, informally, 'Bilko' and 'Sergeant Bilko' - was born, destined to win plaudits by the score, including three consecutive Emmy Awards for Best Comedy Series, and become, unarguably, one of the all-time great sitcoms. Good judges consider it to be the best.
With his brilliant million-watt brain, his thickly bespectacled eyes able to zero in on an approaching sucker at any distance and his razor sharp patter that could get you to pick your own pocket and hand him the wallet, Master Sergeant Ernest G. Bilko was television's first, best and shrewdest con man. Where others saw Fort Baxter, Kansas, as nothing more than a forlorn, forgotten military outpost, Bilko saw a gold mine: an Uncle Sam-underwritten resort casino complete with a captive community of khaki-clad bumpkins with loose grips on their paypackets. Played, by Phil Silvers, like a hard-bopp jazz riff, Bilko was cunning, resourceful and relentless -- a noncommissioned officer and a scoundrel.
The Phil Silvers Show was a sitcom
created by Nat Hiken which was first
broadcast on CBS TV from 1955 to 1959.
Originally the show centered on the lives of the US Army serving
at Fort Baxter in the wilds of Roseville, Kansas. Before, in the fourth season, being based at Camp Fremont, Grove City, California. The central character of the show was Sergeant Ernest G. Bilko, aka Ernie, played brilliantly by the incomparable top banana, Phil Silvers. He was supported by a splendid ensemble of talented character actors. Harvey Lembeck and Allan Melvin were Bilko's henchmen, Paul Ford, the lorded over Colonel Hall, and the hapless bunch of Motor Pool operatives were played by Billy Sands (Paparelli), Herbie Faye (Fender), Maurice Gosfield (Doberman), Mickey Freeman (Zimmerman), Maurice Brenner (Fleischman), Karl Lukas (Kadowski), Jack Healy (Mullen), Terry Carter (Sugarman), P. Jay Sidney (Palmer), Tige Andrews (Gander), Walter Cartier (Dillingham) and Bernie Fein (Gomez).
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