Doris Day's contract with CBS to do this series set a record, with her production company getting several million dollars in up-front money. It was negotiated by Martin Melcher, her husband of 17 years. However, after Melcher died unexpectedly in April of 1968, just five months before the series was to debut, Day said she had no knowledge of ever having signed on to do the show. It turned out that Melcher and the couple's lawyer and financial advisor had squandered the millions of dollars that Day had made in her 20-year career in films and records, leaving her not only flat broke but also more than $500,000 in debt. Melcher, desperate for money, had used his position as her husband and manager and had contracted with CBS to produce a sitcom for Day, but he never told her about it.
At the end of the show's fifth season, with CBS ready to renew it for at least another year, Doris Day in effect canceled her own series. She held a press conference and announced that in five years she believed "all that could be done with this material" had been done, and she was uninterested in continuing to work on it. Day subsequently retired from acting.
The show holds a unique place in TV history for its radically shifting of premise and cast members every season. The character of Doris went from down-home mother running a farm to a chic working girl whose family was eventually written out.
Despite its longevity and ratings success, the show was rarely rerun after its original network run on CBS ended in 1973. It was rerun briefly on a Christian cable channel in the mid-1980s, but it was essentially unseen from then until its 2005 release on DVD.
Denver Pyle played Doris Day's father on the show despite the fact that he was only two years older than Day.