I just watched (much of) the beginning-to-end Monkees marathon on Antenna TV (one of those digital broadcast sub-channels).

All 58 series episodes plus the feature-film epilogue Head were aired over 31 consecutive hours, in memory of the recently deceased co-star Davy Jones.

Things I discovered (or rather rediscovered) during this:

The series was both wholesome and subversive. It incoroprated both Three Stooges slapstick (shot on the same studio lot and occasionally using leftover Stooge props) and Bunuel surrealism. It’s no coincidence that the show’s makers went on to make some of the most groundbreaking feature films of the late ’60s-early ’70s.

If only the derogatory “prefab four” meme (the idea that, as primarily a comedy team playing scripted roles, they weren’t a “real” rock band) had not gotten around to denigrate both the show and the group, the show would have been seen at the time as what it was—a leap several steps beyond the standard Screen Gems sitcom, a bright and life-affirming piece of informed nonsense.

The four actor-singers had distinct comic personalities. No one of them was allowed to overshine the others. They played off of one another very well, especially when they weren’t in reactive mode against the guest characters.

They also had distinct singing voices, and they were all skilled musicians, even though the show’s shooting schedule (much more elaborate than that of your basic living-room sitcom) didn’t allow them to play on most of the backing tracks.

The Monkees series is a work of perfection. And thanks to the growing rancor between the stars, the producers, and the network, the show ended at its peak. It didn’t fall into a slow decline, like so many other series.

The group’s lightweight pop sound was already becoming rear guard by the time the show premiered. By the spring of 1968, when the show ended, that music was even more passe among the emerging rock snobs, and would soon fall under the damning label of “bubblegum.”

And the four co-stars were anxious to make more of their own music, which would inevitably lead them in different directions.

But the Monkees, and their producers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, would not leave without a proper goodbye.

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Some reviewers have called Head a destruction of the Monkees’ image. Actually, it expanded the series’ absurdist premise to its natural extreme.

In the series, the Monkees always saved the day because they were even crazier than the villains, and because they knew that as the heroes they could bend the show’s fictional “reality” to their will.

But in Head, they’re trapped in a world that’s more complicated, even more surreal. No matter how many times our heroes break the proverbial “fourth wall” to escape a scene, they’re herded back into another. The Monkees could no longer save the day, or even themselves; much as the youthful idealism of the Camelot early ’60s was descending into foreign and domestic turmoil.

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I was nine when The Monkees series began its original network run.

It made perfect (non)sense to me then.

And it still does.

The show’s music epitomized commercial pop at its best.

And it still does.