Stories had always been told about male genies coming out of bottles, but they were usually fat, old men. Never had the genie been a gorgeous woman, so that idea really appealed to me, and I created the series based on that premise.

Their daughter Mary Sheldon became a novelist as well. He struggled with bipolar disorder for years; he contemplated suicide at 17 (talked out of it by his father who discovered him) as detailed in his autobiography publiSidney Sheldond in 2005 The Other Side of Me. "
Sheldon created produced and wrote I Dream of Jeannie in his co-production capacity with Screen Gems.

Sidney Sheldon (February 11 1917 – January 30 2007) was an Academy Award-winning American writer. His TV works spanned a 20-year period during which he created The Patty Duke Show (1963–66) I Dream of Jeannie (1965–70) and Hart to Hart (1979–84) but he became most famous after he turned 50 and began writing best-selling novels such as Master of the Game (1982) The Other Side of Midnight (1973) and Rage of Angels (1980). He is the seventh best selling fiction writer of all time.