Asher, who is often erroneously credited with having invented the TV sitcom – there were several adaptations of radio shows in the late 1940s – nevertheless gave a fresh impetus to the genre by using a multiple-camera setup for I Love Lucy. This enabled him to shoot the action simultaneously from different viewpoints, then select the best shots. Earlier sitcoms were broadcast live and recorded on kinescopes, or not recorded at all. Desilu Productions, founded by the comedy couple Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, was among the first companies to foresee the viability and financial benefits of reruns.
Asher was also responsible for dreaming up the hit Beach Party movies, made for the youth market in the early 1960s. "They were carefree fantasies, what I wished my own youth had been like, instead of what it was – a grim existence with an alcoholic and abusive mother after my parents' divorce," he told interviewers.
Asher was born in New York, the son of Lillian Bonner, an actor, and Ephraim M Asher, a successful movie producer, mainly of horror films at Universal. His mother was Catholic, his father Jewish. The family moved to Los Angeles, but after his parents divorced he moved back to New York with his mother. He dropped out of school, worked in the mailroom at Universal and joined the army at 19, serving in the Signal Corps for four years as a photographer.
After the second world war, Asher returned to Universal, where he worked as an assistant cameraman and editor. In 1948, with Richard Quine, he co-produced and co-directed a low-budget boxing melodrama, Leather Gloves, starring Cameron Mitchell. But he was soon drawn to television and returned to feature films only spasmodically. In 1952, after directing episodes of Racket Squad and Big Town, he was asked to direct I Love Lucy, which had already been going for a year. He stayed with the show, shot before a live audience, for five years.
Towards the end of that time, Asher directed three B-movies: Mobs, Inc. (1956), made up of three episodes of Racket Squad; The Shadow on the Window (1957), a tense thriller about teenagers who hold a woman hostage; and The 27th Day (1957), a crude cold war science-fiction drama.
After I Love Lucy, he continued to produce and direct sitcoms such as Fibber McGee and Molly (1959), an unsuccessful transfer of a beloved radio series to television. Then, in the early 60s, with rock'n'roll movies a thing of the past and Twist movies on their last swaying legs, Asher came up with a new series of musical pictures, starting with Beach Party (1963), the first in a succession of five. All starred Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello with guest appearances by fading Hollywood stars. The plots usually involved a group of young, scantily clad surfers defending their right to continue their love-ins and inane activities to surf music without interference from killjoy "squares".
Beach Party had Robert Cummings studying the sex habits of the surfin' and swingin' habitués of Malibu, including Avalon and Funicello, who don't seem to have sex but sing and dance to Dick Dale and the Del-Tones. In Muscle Beach Party (1964), Avalon heads a group of surfers who clash with a group of musclemen sent to ruin the kids' fun. Bikini Beach (1964) had Keenan Wynn attempting to evict surfers from the beach where he wants to build a community for senior citizens. Predictably, the old people enjoy beach life as much as the youngsters. In the same film, Avalon plays a dual role as a surfer and (embarrassingly) a British pop singer called Potato Bug. Boris Karloff and Stevie Wonder were among the flotsam and jetsam.
Beach Blanket Bingo and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (both 1965) delivered more of the same. In the latter, 70-year-old Buster Keaton played a witch doctor with Elizabeth Montgomery making a cameo appearance as his daughter, known as "the Witches' Witch". It was a winking nod at her role in Bewitched as Samantha, the good witch attempting to live as an ordinary housewife.
Asher had married Montgomery while directing Johnny Cool (1963), in which she played a gangster's moll. Both of them were recently divorced from actors, he from Dani Sue Nolan, and she from Gig Young. As producer and director of Bewitched, Asher had a great influence on the content and got Montgomery to demonstrate her trademark twitching of her nose each time she was about to cast a spell.
The marriage came to an end at around the same time that Bewitched ended. Asher then married the actor Joyce Bulifant. He never had the same kind of success, though he continued to direct episodes from sitcoms, some of them feeble spin-offs from movies: Alice (1977-79), derived from Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore; The Bad News Bears (1979-80) and Private Benjamin (1981-82).
Asher made two further features, The Evil Protege (aka Night Warning, 1982), a horror movie; and Movers and Shakers (1985), a comedy about a studio boss (Walter Matthau) trying to make a quality picture from a sex manual.
Late in life, Asher recalled that the Beach Party movies gave him the most pleasure in his career. "The scripts were sheer nonsense, but they were fun and positive."
• William Milton Asher, producer and director, born 8 August 1921; died 16 July 2012
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