YMMV / Chico and the Man

• Genius Bonus: The name Chico means "boy" in Spanish, so the literal title of the show is "Boy and the Man", reflecting the main characters' apprentice-mentor relationship.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The game show Concentration – which was airing in syndication during the time Chico was a hit NBC series – had a puzzle in its bonus round "Freddie Prinze Plays Chico." The episode was taped in December 1976, but because of how television syndication worked in the 1970s and other factors, the episode did not air for the first time in its markets until March 1977, almost two months after Prinze had committed suicide.
  • The episode "Chico's Padre", in which Chico’s estranged father shows up and asks his son to move to Mexico and work for him. Ed and Louie are saddened by the prospect of Chico leaving for good. This would end up coming to pass anyway after Freddie Prinze's suicide. Even harsher is that this was the first episode aired after Prinze's death.
  • "Natural Causes" where Ed worries about how much longer he has before he dies of old age. Shortly after the show's cancellation, Jack Albertson was diagnosed with cancer, from which he died in 1981.
• Replacement Scrappy: Raul, during the final season. Gabriel Melgar played the role of the 12-year-old Tijuana orphan, cast there after Freddie Prinze's death earlier in 1977. He was introduced as a means of keeping the show on longer to build up a more sizeable syndication package, but he ended up ironically being the reason the show failed in syndication as the tactic failed to push the show past the "magic" 100 episodes threshold and the format change further made the show undesirable for reruns.
• Values Resonance: For a show that's chock full of Values Dissonance, season two episode "The Juror" still holds up quite well in light of the Me Too era when Ed has a hard time believing that a well respected man in the neighborhood is on trial for inappropriate behavior with a woman.

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