What happened to Jeb on Black Sheep Squadron?
A teenage pilot joins the Black Sheep late in the run and then vanishes from television. Here's who Jeb Pruitt was, which episodes he flew in, and what actually ended his tour.
He shows up with a fresh commission, a questionable birth certificate, and about six weeks of airtime ahead of him. Nothing in the show kills him off.
Second Lieutenant Jeb Pruitt, played by Jeb Stuart Adams, arrives in "Forbidden Fruit," which aired February 22, 1978 — episode 7 of the second season and episode 31 of the series. The hook is his age. He's a gifted flyer whose paperwork does not survive a close reading, and Pappy Boyington has to decide what to do about a teenager in a Corsair.
He was one of two additions in that episode. The other was Lieutenant Samantha "Sam" Greene (Denise DuBarry), General Moore's daughter, arriving as a nurse.
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Why he arrived so late
By late 1977 the show was not the show it started as. NBC had already canceled it once, brought it back, and renamed it from Baa Baa Black Sheep to Black Sheep Squadron to get distance from the nursery rhyme. The second-season retool leaned into a new ensemble:
- Pilots dropped — T.J. Wiley (Robert Ginty) and Bob Anderson (John Larroquette) both left after the sixth episode of season 2.
- Gutterman gone without a word — James Whitmore Jr.'s Captain Jim Gutterman simply doesn't appear in season 2, with no explanation on screen. He'd taken a role in The Boys of Company C, shot in the Philippines, and then an offer to work opposite James Garner on The Rockford Files.
- Nurses added — four of them across the final seven episodes, including head nurse Dottie Dixon (Katherine Cannon), who is killed in action.
- Jeb added — the young pilot, slotted into the same batch of new faces.
The Black Sheep got a teenager and a nursing station in the same episode, which tells you roughly what the network thought the problem was.
What he actually did
Jeb flew in five of the last seven episodes: "Forbidden Fruit," "Fighting Angels" (March 1), "The Iceman" (March 8), "The Show Must Go On... Sometimes" (March 23), and "A Little Bit of England" (April 6).
That last one is the series finale. Bob Boyle gets shot down and is sheltered by an English coastwatcher, the episode ends, and Black Sheep Squadron ends with it — 36 episodes across two seasons, September 23, 1976 to April 6, 1978.
So the answer is that nothing happened to Jeb. He was introduced six weeks before cancellation and simply stopped existing along with everyone else. No death scene, no transfer, no final flight.
Robert Conrad's Boyington had a technical advisor on the payroll: the real Gregory Boyington, who called the show "inaccuracies, hogwash, and Hollywood hokum."
For the record: Jeb Stuart Adams is the son of actor Nick Adams, and Nancy Conrad — one of the season 2 nurses — is Robert Conrad's daughter. The final stretch of Black Sheep Squadron was, in several senses, a family operation.
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