After watching Witness Jesse Duke,it got me thinking.

Seen as it was the last full Coy and Vance episode why didn't the directors or producers (or whoever decided what episode was filmed in what order) have Bo and Luke written into that episode and have Coy and Vance leave at the end of that episode when Jesse regained his sight,instead of the brief 5 minute reunion in Welcome Back Bo and Luke.

Judging from other emotional episodes, Bo and Luke would do anything to help out anyone or get to the hospital.So surely Uncle Jesse in a serious,possibly permanent condition would be more important than the NASCAR circuit.

Just my opinion.

I totally agree with you. That was something I never quite understood after watching that episode either. They easily could have written Bo and Luke back into that episode without it being too weird. So I'm not really sure why they did it the way they did.

It could be that the dispute wasn't resolved until after that episode was filmed. I don't know.

After watching Witness Jesse Duke,it got me thinking.

Seen as it was the last full Coy and Vance episode why didn't the directors or producers (or whoever decided what episode was filmed in what order) have Bo and Luke written into that episode and have Coy and Vance leave at the end of that episode when Jesse regained his sight,instead of the brief 5 minute reunion in Welcome Back Bo and Luke.

Judging from other emotional episodes, Bo and Luke would do anything to help out anyone or get to the hospital.So surely Uncle Jesse in a serious,possibly permanent condition would be more important than the NASCAR circuit.

Just my opinion.

Excellent question and good points, C.D. According to lore, the idea for a more "serious" Dukes script came from the producers, who thought it might win back the fading Dukes audience. Bruce Howard wrote the script for "Witness: Jessie Duke" but told producers he doubted the serious story would win back Dukes fans, since it was light-hearted hijinks that brought people to the show to begin with. Good as the script was, Bruce was correct; it wasn't enough to make the audience return, Coy and Vance were still intruders on sacred ground.

The episode was filmed before / whilst the dispute was still being solved.

Episodes were filmed on a tight schedule (7 days, occasionally just 6 or 5), so there probably wasn't logistical reason to "hold out in hope". Also bear in mind that the broadcast order is often quite different from the production order - in fact, when we last see Coy and Vance in the opening act of "Welcome Back, Bo and Luke", Wopat and Schneider had already filmed two other episodes prior to this.

Regardless of the general regard of Coy and Vance, "Witness: Jesse Duke" is surely their best episode (though I think "The Great Insurance Fraud" is strong and unusually dark) and, if it could be said about a Coy & Vance story, a classic episode. It would no doubt be held in even greater esteem if it had been Bo and Luke in place of their carbon copy cousins.

It is one of the episodes that most made an impact on me as a child and on that stuck most firmly in my head all those years until I began collecting / trading off-air recordings of the series in the later 1990s. I remember after it had finished being shown (the series was ran in the U.K. on BBC1 on Monday evenings at that point), closing my eyes, stretching my arms around and trying to feel my way around the house a la Uncle Jesse, until my mother told me off for risk of having an accident!

The lack of time and last minute arrangements probably also accounts for the swift departure of Coy and Vance at the start of "Welcome Back, Bo and Luke". Which always greatly disappointed me - surely even the most loathsome of Coy and Vance viewers would have liked to see both Duke boys team up for one adventure before the clones exited.

This is the best Coy and Vance episode and for what it's worth it's one of my favorites even though it was missing Bo and Luke.