Henry Zebrowski

And the kids in the 60s, they didn't give a shit about Sammy Davis Jr.,

So, in a desperate bid to be wanted by anybody, Sammy made an extremely ill-advised appearance at the 1972 Republican Convention, where he hugged a visibly uncomfortable Richard Nixon on stage.

It was just Sammy Davis Jr.

The picture is real.

It's Sammy Davis Jr.

He's hugging Richard Dixie.

He's got his eyes closed.

And Nixon looks like, he's like, get the fuck off of me.

Yes.

It's bad for everybody.

And the backlash, of course, nearly ruined Sammy's career.

But after he appeared on an episode of the controversial sitcom All in the Family, in which he ad-libbed a shocking kiss with Archie Bunker, the show's resident bigot,

cachet and he wrote that whole thing yes he didn't he surprised all of them davis therefore got a meeting with nbc to discuss projects and davis pitched an idea about a guy who worked for satan dude he did your pretty face is going to

We're going to get to that in a second.

I have some questions about that.

Coincidentally, NBC already had a comedy with a similar concept with a working title, Beat the Devil, written by the same guys who'd helmed Bewitched.

So, you know, they already knew a little bit about witchiness, Satanism, so on and so forth.

Yeah.

Their idea was folded into Sammy's idea of a satanic comedy, and thus a show called Poor Devil, starring Sammy Davis Jr.

as a damned soul named Sammy, was born and put into production.