I Dream of Jeannie is one of the most classic sitcoms of all time, and that’s not just my opinion, it’s a fact. By the time I got into it, the series was nearly 35 to 40 years old, and no bad sitcom is still airing regularly on cable that many decades after the fact. I can’t quite remember if it was Nick at Night or TV Land that hooked me, but I remember watching it a whole lot.

Oddly enough, just like Gilligan’s Island, the very first season was shot in black and white instead of full color. They apparently had the technology available, but the special effects were simply easier to pull off in black and white than in color. As the crew and technology improved, they made the switch to full color the following season. The concept of the show is brilliant: an astronaut, which was a fairly new occupation at the time, finds a genie in a bottle and essentially gets a free wish-granter for life.

I suppose the one real flaw in the concept is that nothing was really stopping Jeannie from granting any wish Major Nelson wanted, aside from some vague established taboos whose specifics I can’t quite recall, though I know they existed. Unlike Dragon Ball Z, Major Nelson didn’t have to wait a year between wishes. Unlike the Monkey’s Paw, there was never any real downside to a wish. And unlike Aladdin, he wasn’t capped at three. It was really just Tony’s own moral compass keeping him from taking over the planet or whatever. But she clearly wasn’t the only genie of her kind out there, so you’d think the world would be a lot more chaotic as a result.

I think every straight guy watching the show had the exact same thought: with a gorgeous blonde genie who’s completely smitten with you, you could get pretty much anything you ever wanted, sometimes without even needing real magic. Barbara Eden as Jeannie genuinely inspired real-life fantasies that have lasted multiple generations, and even reached men who never actually watched the show properly.

But one of the best parts of the show was Jeannie’s interactions with regular people. Probably the most memorable was her dynamic with Tony’s friend Roger Healy, who ironically becomes her temporary master after caving to temptation and using her powers for some very selfish wishes, though maybe not the kind you’d expect, if you catch my drift. In disguise, she’d also get to interact with plenty of minor characters.

Also fascinating was seeing the other magical beings scattered around the world, including her sister, also played by Barbara Eden. It’s wild that they had the technical capability back in the 1960s to have one actor play two distinct characters interacting on screen at the same time, well before Eddie Murphy pulled off the same trick in the Dr. Dolittle movies. Except her sister is literally named Jeannie II. What kind of unimaginative genie parents did these two have?

This show was, of course, a classic will-they-won’t-they setup. Every guy watching wondered just how long Tony would resist temptation and avoid treating her as a magical concubine. Tony actually starts the series engaged, but Jeannie, being a rather jealous genie, unravels that engagement and is essentially responsible for torpedoing every relationship Tony attempts with another woman throughout the show. Which honestly worked out in his favor, since not many women, especially in the 1960s, would’ve been thrilled about their boyfriend or husband having a gorgeous genie who grants his every wish and clearly wants him for herself.

The series ran for just five seasons, but at 139 episodes, it definitely feels longer, especially in syndication, and even more so given how reluctant networks seem to be about airing the tail end of the series. NBC executives, unhappy with sagging ratings, decided to have the two characters officially marry in season five, a move loudly and bitterly opposed by the show’s creators as well as both Larry Hagman and Barbara Eden. What NBC actually did was deal the show a fatal blow, since it killed off the tension between the two leads the moment they became a happily married couple. Eden argued the marriage made no sense, and I’d mostly agree, though I think it should’ve been saved for the series finale. It would’ve made even more sense if she’d lost her powers upon marrying and become fully human, which, notably, she never did.

I think Sidney Sheldon, Larry Hagman, and Barbara Eden should all be proud of how culturally relevant this sitcom remains, especially given that both men have been gone for quite some time now and Barbara Eden is in her 90s. Fun fact, the show was actually created to compete directly with ABC’s Bewitched, despite sharing the same production company and some of the same resources. Elizabeth Montgomery and Barbara Eden were reportedly good friends in real life and never engaged in any bitter rivalry over which show or character reigned supreme. And while Bewitched was technically the more successful of the two, running eight seasons, I’ve always preferred I Dream of Jeannie in nearly every respect.