The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (also known as simply Dobie Gillis or Max Shulman's Dobie Gillis in later seasons and in syndication) is an American sitcom starring Dwayne Hickman that aired on CBS from September 29, 1959, to June 5, 1963. The series was adapted from the "Dobie Gillis" short stories written by Max Shulman since 1945, and first collected in 1951 under the same title as the subsequent TV series, which drew directly on the stories in some scripts. Shulman also wrote a feature-film adaptation of his "Dobie Gillis" stories for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1953, titled The Affairs of Dobie Gillis, which featured Bobby Van in the title role. Hickman in Dobie Gillis was among the first leads to play a teenager on an American television program. Dobie Gillis broke ground by depicting elements of the current counterculture, particularly the Beat Generation, primarily embodied in a stereotypical version of the "beatnik". Series star Dwayne Hickman later said that Dobie represented “the end of innocence of the 1950s before the oncoming 1960s revolution”. Overview Dobie Gillis and Maynard G. Krebs The series revolved around teenager Dobie Gillis (Dwayne Hickman), who aspired to have popularity, money, and the attention of beautiful and unattainable girls. He did not have any of these qualities in abundance, and the tiny crises surrounding Dobie's lack of success made the story in each weekly episode. Also constantly in question, by Dobie and others, was Dobie's future, as the boy proved to be a poor student and an aimless drifter. His sidekick and de facto best friend was American television's first beatnik, Maynard G. Krebs (Bob Denver), who became the series' breakout character. An enthusiastic fan of jazz music (with a strong distaste for the music of Lawrence Welk), Maynard plays the bongos, collects tinfoil and petrified frogs, and steers clear of romance, authority figures, and work (yelping "Work?!" every time he hears the word). Always speaking with the vernacular and slang of the beatniks and jazz musicians he admired, Maynard punctuates his sentences with the word "like" and has a tendency towards malapropisms. The main running gag on Dobie Gillis would have Dobie or one of the other characters rattling off a series of adjectives describing something undesirable or disgusting ("I'd be a ragged, useless, dirty wreck!"), at which point a previously unseen Maynard would appear (entering the scene in close-up), saying "You rang?" Dobie Gillis