In 1972, Don Rickles starred (briefly) in a situation comedy called The Don Rickles Show. CBS must not have liked the show much before it even aired because they gave it a certain-death time slot and very little promotion. It was produced by Sheldon Leonard and he must not have been too wild about it because years later in his autobiography, he didn't mention it; not in the text and not even in a list of (supposedly) all the many shows with which he was involved. It had a bit of the look-and-feel of The Dick Van Dyke Show but among its obvious flaws was that Don Rickles was not Dick Van Dyke.
I've mentioned it a few times on this blog because a bunch of my friends and I went to a filming of one episode and even from the crummy seats we had, we could feel how unhappy Mssrs. Leonard (who did the warm-up) and Rickles were that night. According to Wikipedia, "The series aired on CBS from January 14 until May 26, 1972. It ranked 56th out of 78 shows that season with an average 15.5 rating." Maybe Don should have tried dropping his pants and firing a rocket.
One of the thing someone did to try and promote it was to make Rickles the subject of an episode of Ralph Edwards' This Is Your Life, which was then in the midst of one of its several unsuccessful revivals. But the half-hour is filled with comedians so here you are…