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CHARGE AGAINST: Talentless central-casting featherweights conceived in a boardroom for a cut-rate sitcom version of A Hard Day’s Night.

CASE FILES: Legendary cinema mavericks Bob Rafelson and the late Bert Schneider were still a couple years away from Five Easy Pieces and Easy Rider when they tried to channel the Beatles’ goofy charm into a sitcom, hiring Micky Dolenz, Mike Nesmith, Peter Tork, and lone Brit Davy Jones, despite the fact that none of the four were particularly accomplished musicians, much less in a band together. By the time The Monkees debuted in September 1966, the real Beatles were sprinting madly, not from shrieking fans, but from the mop-top image the show was aping; they’d stopped playing live, had an album cover banned due to severed baby heads, and had begun work on Sgt. Pepper’s. This made the Monkees’ pop trifles — and their inability to play instruments — seem all the more trifling by comparison. The opinion still persists, as they’ve been denied their rightful place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for 26 years running.

THE DEFENSE: You know who had no issue with the Prefab Four? The Fab Four. Nesmith, who parlayed his experience into a career as a music-video pioneer, befriended the Beatles, and according to the 1986 book Monkeemania, John Lennon called the Monkees “the greatest comic talent since the Marx Brothers.” Rafelson directed the 1968 pitch-black Monkees cult classic Head, as self-aware and acerbic as the show was frothy and oblivious. Over time, the Monkees’ insistence on remaining a band long after they were contractually obligated (and after joyless hippies wished them gone) made them unlikely punk icons: “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone” was covered by both the Sex Pistols and Minor Threat, without irony. Maybe. STEVE KANDELL